Starve Acre starts out looking like it’s going to be a folk-horror reworking of The Amityville Horror, spooky house and all that. Then changes tack and appears to be attempting a folk-horror reworking of The Exorcist, possessed child and all that. Before finally settling down to tell a story about different ways of coping with grief.
It’s a mood piece in many ways. So if you’ve pitched up looking for entertainment – boo scares, ghoulies, things going bump – park those expectations. Subterranean sounds and bleak visuals abound in this story set on the Yorkshire moors in the 1970s, where the modern, rational mindset meets the old ways and comes off second best.
So, yes, a touch Wicker Man then. Matt Smith plays the Edward Woodward character, Richard, a man of science who has moved to the moors with wife Juliette and son Owen to live in the house where he grew up.
Things are going wrong from the film’s early moments, when young Owen blinds a horse at the local fair. The shrinks are soon being wheeled in to find out made him do it. On the other side of the rational divide, local yokel Gordon believes he has an explanation for Owen’s behaviour, one that hangs off the sort of stories that Richard heard from his mad old dad in his own troubled childhood, and has no desire to hear again. Of Jack Grey and Dandelion Jack, figures who may be more than just a local folk memory. And of the great old oak out in the Starve Acre field, said once to have been a portal to the other side but long since felled.
And so, defiantly, foolishly, Richard decides to dig out the oak tree’s roots and he gets Owen to help him, precipitating the very thing that his digging was meant to disprove. Dot dot dot.
If it never quite adds up to more than the sum of its parts, there’s a lot to like here. The performances by Matt Smith, all Byronic hair and angularity, as Richard, a bluff Yorkshireman possibly modelled on the poet Ted Hughes. Morfydd Clark, so magnetically present in Saint Maud, does it again here, energy pouring out of her eyes as the less rationalist, more superstitious Juliette.
Arthur Shaw makes a tender and fragile Owen. Sean Gilder is an excellently bluff Gordon, whose stories have more basis in fact than Richard, in particular, can handle.
In small roles but highly effective, Melanie Kilburn as Mrs Forde, a local medium/witch. Erin Richards as Juliette’s sister, quite a revelation if you only know her from TV show Gotham. And Robert Emms as one of Richard’s college co-workers, another arch rationalist who will find the gravitational pull of the old ways irresistible.
As well as The Wicker Man, that long-running BBC series A Ghost Story for Christmas supplies some of the storytelling style – simple, direct, with not too much in the way of special effects. Director Daniel Kokotajlo wants to conjure a matter-of-fact world of dry stone walls, scabby grass, millstone-grit houses, mist and wind. In Kokotajlo’s Yorshire crows caw relentlessly and when it snows it comes sideways.
The production design is superb. The acting is on the money. The largely acoustic score by Matthew Herbert – harps and bassoons, a lot going on at an almost sub-acoustic level – is highly evocative.
The film’s only real problem is its pacing. Not much happens early on and the attempts to invoke an atmosphere of eeriness and impending doom don’t quite gel. So that when things get quite urgent and events come tumbling one after the other in the banzai finale – The Wicker Man again – it works, but it feels almost like it’s part of another film. I liked and admired it rather than loved it.
Starve Acre – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
