Matt Smith is best known as the Eleventh Doctor on the BBC’s Doctor Who, but he’s also done some spooky work in Last Night in Soho and Morbius. Morfydd Clark burst onto the scene in 2019 with the religious horror film Saint Maud and the creature feature Crawl. The two actors briefly worked together in 2016’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Now, they’re together again in the folk horror tale Starve Acre.
Starve Acre is about a man named Richard (Smith, House of the Dragon) who moves into his childhood home along with his wife, Juliette (Clark, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), and their son, Owen (Arthur Shaw), to raise his own family. Owen unexpectedly dies, but before he does, he exhibits strange and confusing behavior, including hearing voices from an unseen being named Jack Grey.
Both Juliette and Richard process their grief in different ways; Juliette becomes obsessed with the feeling that Owen may still be in the house, while Richard researches the land around the estate itself and learns some peculiar things. The parents’ independent methods of mourning collide in creepy and terrifying ways.
Starve Acre is the second feature film from writer/director Daniel Kokotajlo (Apostasy). He adapted his screenplay from the 2019 novel by The Loney author Andrew Michael Hurley. The story is a treatise on grief and coping, but the circumstances of the situation are not at all typical. The woman’s desperate clinging to the departed’s memory and the man’s stoic search for distraction seem to embrace (or reinforce) stereotypes, but the secrets that both dig up during their journeys are essential to the story.
Kokotajlo has managed to make a movie that captures the vibe of a classic folk horror film while still feeling modern. Starve Acre feels like it could be taking place in the past without having been made in the past. The Northern England location and the rural farmhouse setting not only help with the retro vibe, but they also make the movie feel cold and gloomy. It’s a great setting for a ghost story.
Unfortunately, Starve Acre isn’t really a ghost story. There are figurative ghosts of Richard’s family and property that are dug up, and Juliette does make contact with…something in the house. Starve Acre is more of a psychological horror movie than it is a haunted house movie. And that is to its detriment. Just when the ghostly elements get interesting, they vanish into thin air, leaving the movie with nowhere to go.
Starve Acre is the very definition of slow-burn horror. While there are creepy moments, the time between them passes glacially, and not in a tense way, either. Instead of building suspense and anticipation for the next creepy moment, the long stretches of nothing just have the audience wondering why the movie is so long.
It should be mentioned that the place that Starve Acre winds up is ultimately worthwhile. It takes a long, grueling path to get there, but the destination is its own reward. And where it ends up is not where the viewer expects it to go.
As for Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark, well, they deserve better. They deserve a better script, better direction, better pacing. Just a better movie. They try, and in the end, the performances are the strongest aspect of the film, but really, Starve Acre as a whole just feels a bit flat.
GRADE: C+
Release Date: July 26, 2024 (Limited)
Running Time: 1 hour 38 minutes
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
The post ‘Starve Acre’ Review: Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark Shine in Grief-Fueled Folk Horror Tale appeared first on ShowbizJunkies.
0 Comments