phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2024

Starve Acre



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2023
Runtime: 1h 38m
Country: UK
Language: English
Genre Tags: Drama, Horror
Plot Summary: An idyllic rural family life of a couple is thrown into turmoil when their son starts acting out of character.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: A slow burn, folk horror, period piece. Almost plays like a dour, stripped-down Wicker Man. Muted visually and emotionally, it carries a subtle feeling of dread its entire runtime. Even the climatic boiling-over point is played quietly, which just underscores the horror of family trauma intertwined with the greater horror of ancient pagan rituals.


Outside Reviews:

Guy Lodge
Formidably Freaky New Slab of British Folk Horror Goes Deeper Underground

You can smell what’s happening in “Starve Acre” before you puzzle the rest of it out. The grassy, peaty dampness of its rural Yorkshire setting seems to hit the olfactory glands without any scratch-and-sniff assistance, only intensifying as the film unearths its literally deep-buried secrets. Daniel Kokotajlo‘s impressive second feature unfolds in a vein of British folk horror that has been popular of late — with films from Ben Wheatley’s “A Field in England” to Mark Jenkins’s “Enys Men” all tapping into that retro “Wicker Man” eeriness — but rarely with such rattling sensory specificity or formal refinement. Starring Morfydd Clark and Matt Smith as former townies unprepared for the full burden of lore they inherit with their desolate farmhouse, it’s a tale of quite outlandish fantastical leaps, grounded by the chills it also finds in common weather and wildlife.


Peter Bradshaw
3 out of 5 stars - Intelligent performances in sinister Yorkshire folk horror

Award-winning director Daniel Kokotajlo made a real impression five years ago with his fiercely distinctive debut feature, Apostasy, set in an enclosed religious world. Here is his diverting but frankly more generic follow-up, adapted from the novel by Andrew Michael Hurley. It is billed as contemporary folk horror but borders on film-school pastiche, and “contemporary” means set in the era of The Wicker Man in the early 70s – a British world of brown corduroy, Austin 1100s, no central heating, odd locals and a persistent, sinister encroaching gloom in the countryside. The movie teeters on a knife-edge between scary and silly, and yet without that weird flavour of silly, the scares wouldn’t mean as much.