Starve Acre: Yet Another Rural British Village with an Evil Secret, What's New?

By Chris Knight

Rating: C-

If you like creepy tales of folklore set in the wilder corners of the British Isles - well, you’ve got lots to choose from, including this year’s The Watchers, from Ishana Night Shyamalan, Alex Garland’s Men (2022), with Jessie Buckley, 2017’s The Ritual (OK, set in Sweden but the hikers are British); and a couple from Ben Wheatley, most notably 2013’s A Field in England.

Starve Acre, directed by Daniel Kokotajlo and adapted from a novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, ticks all the boxes. It’s set in the 1970s, somewhere in the moorsy English countryside, where the locals drop their definite articles and speak in something decidedly not Received Pronunciation.

Matt Smith is kind of sorry he left the city.

Matt Smith stars as Richard, a scholarly archeologist who has moved back into his childhood home on the assumption that the country air will be good for his wife, Juliet (Morfydd Clark), and their little boy.

It isn’t. The kid starts talking about a mysterious entity called Jack Grey, and at one point stabs a classmate’s pony in the eye. (Fun fact: In 1974, the Church of England set up the Deliverance Ministry to perform exorcisms as required, like a National Health Service for the soul.)

When a tragedy strikes the family, it’s enough to tip just about everyone off the deep end. You’d expect the kid, sucking on the inhaler of the damned, to be the one most affected. But it’s Richard who gets all spooky, obsessively digging into the soft Earth in search of some folkloric oak tree that his dad told him about.

The cinematography adds to the mood with odd angles and shots of creepy old drawings - woodcuttings depicting woodcutting! - while the soundtrack obligingly adds noises that might be the wind or a far-off scream.

But atmosphere will only take you so far, and it soon becomes apparent that Starve Acre is 10 liters of helium in a 20-liter balloon. The result is limp and never fully takes flight.

The film does get great mileage from its actors. Smith and Clark are committed to their roles, and there’s good work from supporting players Erin Richards as Juliet’s sister, and the craggy-faced Sean Gilder as an old family friend.

Heck even little Arthur Shaw as the boy does a decent job. But ultimately, Starve Acre ends up inviting comparison to other tales of nature, isolation and madness by the likes of Wheatley or Robert Eggers, only to place a distant second to other Gothic horrors.

Starve Acre. Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo. Starring Matt Smith, and Morfydd Clark. Available Aug. 2 on demand.