With roiling atmosphere and vibes to spare, Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre (2023) hearkens to what many regard as a simpler, purer time–a time of cycles and seasons, of neighbors agreed to a single channel of traditional values and shared memories, of old stories about the Old Ways of woodlands dark and days bewitched. I am talking, of course, of 1970s British telly and the spooky stories you could often find there–TV movies like The Stone Tape (1972) and Penda’s Fen (1974), all the Ghost Stories for Christmas taken from M.R. James and Charles Dickens, plus movies like The Wicker Man (1973) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Starve Acre is 1970s Folk Horror TV: The Movie. Watching this is taking a grainy lo-fi bath in a salt made of Amicus Productions, as close as a movie gets to the taste of tea left steeping until it’s bitter. Its vibe shall attract its tribe–if this isn’t what you’re into, Kokotajlo will not convert you. For the rest, don’t come to Starve Acre for the story; come for the experience. Bring a sweater.
Based on Andrew Michael Hurley’s 2019 novel of the same name, Starve Acre stars Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark as young marrieds Richard and Juliette, the pair of whom live at Richard’s late father’s country house of Starve Acre with their son Ewan. The house is isolated in its very muddy, rocky part of 1970s England, but where the house might be a character of its own in another film, here that honor resides with the barren fields surrounding it, where archeology professor Richard takes his son for little baby artifact digs. Five years old in the book, but a little older here–maybe eight?–Ewan presents as sweet and loving, but it’s clear from the outset something is wrong. He murmurs in his sleep about someone whistling to him, he has fights at school, and at a local fair, he maims a pony in one of the film’s select touches of gore.
Unsure how to deal with Ewan’s troubles–Richard is disposed to rationalize and blame ghoulish folktales of Jack Grey, aka Dandelion Jack, from old family friend Gordon, while stay-at-home mom Juliette tiptoes around a growing dread of her own son–they must soon confront the sudden loss of Ewan altogether when he dies of an asthma attack. Afterward, Juliette succumbs to a depression so deep it summons her imperious sister Harrie to come stay and Gordon to bring a kindly new age-ish healer around (carefully, in Richard’s absence) to perform a kind of seance. Meanwhile, forced onto an unwelcome sabbatical, Richard buries his grief, pun fully intended, by excavating the field outside, hunting for the root system of a legendary oak that he had talked of with Ewan and his father had apparently run mad trying to find, the discovery of which he also obscurely hopes will better his advancement prospects at the university. In the ground and in the air, each suffering parent seeks after something hidden in plain sight, but it isn’t until Richard’s dig reveals to him the perfectly preserved skeleton of a hare that his grief and Juliette’s grief will find each other and mate. What is born from that wedded sorrow is bizarre, but it will not surprise you. It is one of the film’s virtues that by the time you get to the end, everything feels as natural and inevitable as a change of seasons.
Kokotajlo takes his time with a film in which time is its most abundant resource, with few locations and fewer characters, letting events speak and their echoes resonate. Letting the land speak, too. A persistent feeling of alienation and exile lives at Starve Acre, where daylight is dark and frequent shots of the hills, the stone wall, and the wind threading through tree boughs establish nature as the film’s all-but-silent chorus. Clark and Smith do a fantastic job grounding their characters in what often amounts to solo work, as this is perhaps the most sexless folk horror I have ever seen. I don’t know what the villagers around Starve Acre will get up to if Dandelion Jack brings back spring, but there’s certainly nothing going on that would scandalize The Wicker Man’s Sergeant Howie up until he credits roll, including a phlegmatic sex scene that carries the feeling of subliminal ritual and tacit confession but not intimacy. There are scant tender moments before Ewan’s tragedy where Juliette and Richard evince a faded fondness for each other that seems well-worn, the distance between them less a symptom of conflict than busyness, but after the tragedy, Clark and Smith are well-matched in their portrayals of a couple effectively living separate lives in their grief.
As a meditation on the loss of a child, strains of Hereditary (2018) and Don’t Look Now (1973) can be discerned in Starve Acre, not to mention Lamb (2021) is right there, and Hellraiser (1987) and The Shining (1980), too, but the meat of the film is a knowing recapitulation of 1970s classics its characters might have seen when they turned on the TV. (I believe that Juliette and Harrie are seen watching the 1976 war film The Eagle Has Landed on telly as they muse on the attractiveness of Michael Caine and Gene Hackman. If I had to guess at the significance, I would think that the revisionist story of a WWII German plot to kill Churchill, which ultimately ends badly for the Germans, parallels Richard’s father’s unsuccessful, um, activities in the field outside Starve Acre. Plus, the last clear image we see of the war movie, a nice close-up of Donald Sutherland as the charming IRA agent working with the Germans, the only one in the conspiracy to escape, might represent Jack Grey…Maybe it’s all they could get rights to though. Or maybe Blood on Satan’s Claw would have been too on the nose?) With an adaptation like this, it’s hard not to measure Kokotajlo’s choices against Hurley’s text, as there are drastic plot and character differences between the two versions that may seem arbitrary even as they support the same general story shape. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how the story goes in the novel, as Kokotajlo’s film works fine on its own terms, but I think his alterations speak more directly to the filmic influences on both versions, particularly in building out the story of Richard’s father and the village and their relationship to Starve Acre. In this way, it adheres more closely to The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw and even The Lair of the White Worm (hey, here’s another Doctor Who digging things up he shouldn’t) than its source text. These changes are important principally in showing that the private pain of Richard and Juliette is not, in fact, private at all, but the culmination of a subterranean conflict between pagan and modern worlds that has lain long under the surface of Starve Acre.
In departing from the novel, Kokotajlo has cable-knit his very own chilly little story with its aesthetic of cozy, blue-lit doom and a final reveal worthy of any 1970s Amicus vignette. It is murky and disturbing, but also strangely cozy, with long static shots of countryside measured against long static shots of Juliette tangled and desiccated while Richard clings to his dig site as though he hopes to find not a mummified tree trunk or rabbit bones, but his son alive in the earth. It is miserable; it is beautiful. It is not for everyone, but I savored my time in Starve Acre, and I have no doubt its timeless eeriness will make this a new classic.
Angela Englert is a writer and editor at The Cultural Gutter. You can see her writing here.