Director/Screenplay – Daniel Kokatajlo, Based on the Novel Starve Acre (2019) by Andrew Michael Hurley, Producers – Emma Duffy, Juliette Howell & Tessa Ross, Photography – Adam Scarth, Music – Matthew Herbert, Visual Effects – Atomic Arts (Supervisors – Brooke Lyndon-Stanford & David Simpson), Ghost VFX (Supervisor – Nicholas Bennett) & Thank You Mam, Special Effects Supervisor – Rob Rowley, Creature Effects Supervisor – Sharna Rothwell, Creature Design – Millennium FX, Makeup Design – Lisa Parkinson, Production Design – Francesca Massariol. Production Company – Access Entertainment/BBC Film/BFI/House Productions.
Cast
Matt Smith (Richard Willoughby), Morfydd Clark (Juliette Willoughby), Erin Richards (Harrie), Arthur Shaw (Owen Willoughby), Sean Gilder (Gordon), Robert Emms (Steven), Melanie Kilburn (Mrs Forde), Robert Goodale (Medhurst), Roger Barclay (Dr Monk)
Plot
Richard Willoughby, his wife Juliette and their young son Owen have moved back into his family farm in rural Yorkshire, while Richard has a teaching job in the archaeology department at the local university. At the same time, Owen has been demonstrating increasingly disturbed behaviour, culminating in his blinding a pony at a local fair. Owen also talks about the local folklore figure of Jack Grey. Owen then falls ill and dies. In the aftermath, Richard and Juliette are stricken by grief. Afterwards, Richard begins to obsessively dig in the field, uncovering the roots of a perfectly preserved oak tree that is said to be a meeting place, even a doorway to the beyond, according to local folklore. From the site, he unearths the bones of a rabbit and is then startled when it begins to regenerate, gaining flesh and then returning to life.
This is an adaptation of Starve Acre (2019), the third novel from Andrew Michael Hurley, a British teacher in literature and creative writing. All of Hurley’s work is set among the British landscape and harkens back to the older, forgotten forms of myth and folklore emerging, a genre we now call Folk Horror. The film version is made by Daniel Kokatajlo, his second feature film after the well-received Apostasy (2017), a semi-autobiographical work about his being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness.
Starve Acre is a perfect example of a slow burn film. That is to say, it is a horror film but its effect lies not in jumpshocks at timed intervals but in the slow accumulation of mood. The film creates a beautifully realised sense of rural place. It is filled with slow, beautifully filmed shots taking in the sleepy countryside, while the design scheme opts for an unspecified 1970s era setting.
Parents Morfydd Clark and Matt SmithMatt Smith at the dig
The more you absorb into the film’s sleepy rural surrounds and watching the grief of Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark play out, the more the film’s effect begins to grow on you. There is a séance scene but that is so low-key that the most spooky it gets is a candle snuffing out and a rack of magazines falling over. The fascination begins to kick in about halfway through when Matt Smith uncovers some animal bones from the dig on the property and then watches as they progressively begin to regenerate and become a living rabbit.
It is about this point that you realise that what you are watching is a British version of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) or the film version Pet Sematary (1989). Pet Sematary and Starve Acre start to chart out fairly similar plot lines – the parents stricken by grief at the death of a child; the father delving into the local folklore he has heard about; the resurrection of an animal, which comes back not quite right; and then the implication that Matt Smith is going to start thinking about bringing the child back to life – although this is the point that Starve Acre parts ways with Pet Sematary and goes in different direction.
The end the film arrives at is really quite a deranged one and the final scene that is quite a grim one. It sits perfectly with the film’s slow build and accumulation of mood, taking us in its slow progression through the character’s emotional states to step over a point where such seems perfectly logical.
