Starve Acre
Director ~ Daniel Kokotajlo
Writers ~ Daniel Kokotajlo, Andrew Michael Hurley
2023, UK
Stars ~ Matt Smith, Morfydd Clark, Arthur Shaw
It’s the Seventies and, apparently at the encouragement of his wife, archaeologist Smith moves his family back to the desolate farmhouse where he digs up his traumatic past there and into a Folk Horror plot. Their young boy is also acting up, quite disturbingly, saying that a voice called Jack makes him do bad things.
Although it may superficially seem a departure from Kokotajlo’s previous film about Jahovah Winesses, ‘Starve Acre’ is just as much about the damage caused families, cults, tradition and Faith. It’s also a genre exploration of grief so it’s a dour piece, with the tone of Seventies supernatural brilliantly captured: the BBC MR James adaptations, Nigel Kneales ‘Beast’ episode ‘Baby’ and ‘Robin Redbreast’ mostly come to mind. Certainly, this must be the most authentic-feeling Seventies British Supernatural homage since Mark Jenkin’s ‘Enys Men’. ‘Starve Acre’ is slicker and doesn’t have the sticky-taped together edges that typifies the era, but the ambiance seeps in and become a fine facsimile. There’s a lot of homage and riffing on past cinema around, and perhaps there always will be, and Roger Luckhurst gives a lofty reason for it:
“If we have lived through the crisis of this latter-day version of capitalism, stumbling on undead since at least the 2008 economic crash and the Anglo-American political convulsions of 2016, no wonder horror has been a privileged way of exploring the traumatic origins and monstrous progeny of this era.”
[Roger Luckhurst, “So Retro: why modern horror is in thrall to the past”, Sight & Sound: October 2024, volume 34, Issue 8, pg’s 40-3]
This too, because horror has always been rummaging in haunted and ugly pasts and social anxiety. But an example such as ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ might enjoy Nineties recreation, it is also about realising the distance between childhood loves and adult awareness. ‘Starve Acre’ is very contemporary in its self-awareness as a treatise on grief, and the period is of secondary importance. The past is plotting against you. However, there is a simpler, more direct conclusion in that these films are simply reaching for what the creators loved as youths. Giallo is namechecked frequently from this era, from ‘Maxxine’ to ‘Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes’, and you can barely move for Eighties recreations and Carpenteresque synth-scores.
It’s this retro-atmosphere and Matt Smith performance that are the strengths of this film: Smith is an excellent slippery actor, so that you never know quite where you stand with him, if he can be trusted (and that’s why I liked his Dr. Who, investing the character with a proper edginess although let down by scripts and re-imaging The Doctor as a superhero). The highlights of 'Starve Acre' are when Smith reveals some of his past in a rare moment of openness and the reanimation of a rabbit. It’s the latter that spices things up as we move towards the inevitable.
Folk Horror has always excelled at dread, and ‘Starve Acre’, although meandering, does have this. If it doesn’t quite reach for more – although the perversity of the rabbit has potential – it still provides a decent descent into the uncanniness of grief, of failing to overcome trauma, as well as the oddness and fear of small communities and rare faiths. And therefore, it digs up a lot of raw horror themes in appealing genre packaging.
