A CASE OF DEJA VU

Starve Acre (2023) Dir Daniel Kokotajlo BFI Blu Ray.

At the beginning of Starve Acre a young boy named Owen cannot sleep. When his mother speaks to him he says that the whistling has gone now. The next day, when his parents are resting, under a tree, near a cricket pitch, they’re disturbed by a young girl’s scream followed by the cry of a distressed horse that’s just had one of its eyes injured. The attacker is Owen holding a bloodstained twig.

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It’s an arresting opening that makes you think of the folklorish horrors of M.R.James’s story 'O Whistle and I’ll Come to you My Lad' and Peter Schaffer’s play Equus which is about a disturbed young man who blinds horses. 

When Owen is sent to see a psychiatrist we think we are in for a psychological horror film centring on him. Well, not quite. For a short time later the boy mysteriously dies. He has been sacrificed to be ‘returned’ in the form of an embodied spirit named Jack Grey who’s taken the form of a hare with all of that animal’s supernatural and mythological associations. (The wife’s subsequent cradling of the hare then has you thinking of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Nigel Kneale’s TV film Baby, whilst a ghostly brief sighting of Owen, next to a TV screen evoked Poltergeist and Videodrome.)

I’ve no problem with references to other works of art but not at the expense of appearing derivative. And in the case of Starve Acre the referencing appears to make the film self-consciously cover familiar folk horror tropes. It’s as if the producer and director wanted to make a mainstream movie (not quite) still incorporating an experimental soundscape and an oblique (or not well plotted) narrative. The result is puzzlement about character motivation and development. The spirit, emanating from the earth and the bowels of a tree, locally described as a 'womb of nature' on the couple’s land in rural Yorkshire, persuades the couple to sacrifice people but the reason behind their malevolence isn’t coherently laid out.

Adding to the uncertainty of the narrative is the detached direction of Daniel Kokotajio. Despite the excellent performances of Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark, they convey very well their guilt and depression whilst grieving for their son, I still felt distanced from their troubles.

Visually Starve Acre is impressive with its brooding, often luminous photography of the landscape. And the striking music or soundscape by Matthew Smith adds considerably to the atmosphere. For a lot of screen time the music kept moving the story menacingly forwards when it ought to have been accompanied by script development.

So, we have a muted slow burner. Starve Acre might deliver more on a second viewing as I unpack its sparse story. Yet I’m more inclined to listen instead to its film soundtrack on vinyl and imagine the disturbing folk horror it should have been.

• Alan Price

First published on https://londongrip.co.uk/