Starve Acre: English folk traditions take root in this disturbing horror set in 1970s Yorkshire

Starve Acre opens with a quotation, three stanzas entitled ‘The Dandelion’ invoking a mythic figure variously known as Jack, Dandelion or Devil who has been cast out – and down – by townsfolk. The poem, calling upon Jack’s return from “nature’s womb” in the coming spring, casts a shadow over all that follows. Its citation might be a way of establishing from the outset the literary origins of Starve Acre, adapted by writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo from Andrew Michael Hurley’s 2019 novel of the same name; within the film, though, the quotation is ascribed to one Neil Willoughby, who will turn out to be the late father of Richard (Matt Smith).

Richard is an academic archaeologist, professionally devoted to unearthing the past, even if his long hair, openly criticised by ‘old-guard’ colleagues, is emblematic of his more modern approach to the field (this is the 1970s). He has his own buried past at Starve Acre, the bleak family property where, as a child, he was subjected repeatedly to Neil’s peculiar ritual abuse – but Richard is drawn back to the remote estate with his wife Juliette (Morfydd Clark), hoping its fresh air will suit their asthmatic young son Owen (Arthur Shaw). Owen starts to act out disturbingly on what he says are the whisperings and whistlings of ‘Jack Grey’, and his sudden death sends Richard and Juliette down a deep hole of despair that will soon intersect with local folklore.

“We have to let him go,” Juliette tells Richard and while she is referring specifically to a hare that her husband has been secretly nursing in his upstairs office, her words resonate with their feelings of loss for Owen. The couple long, like Jack in the opening poem, to rise out of the “cold abyss” of their grief and to live and love each other again. Indeed, as they struggle to work through and get past the death of a child, and their personal predicament runs parallel to something more supernatural, they recall the Baxters in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973).

While Juliette watches Philip Saville’s Hamlet at Elsinore (1964) on the television with her visiting sister Harrie (Erin Richards), the face of Donald Sutherland, playing Fortinbras, will fill the screen as he delivers the final line just before Juliette sees – or imagines that she sees – her son’s ghost, much as Sutherland saw his daughter’s ghost in Don’t Look Now. In 1973, Roeg’s film was on a double-bill with Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Starve Acre too will see outsiders becoming a part of a local ritual. Kokotajlo’s first feature, Apostasy (2017), dramatised the damage and dysfunction that uncompromising religious zeal can cause a family; here he goes further afield with these themes, digging deep into the cultic realms of folk horror.

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) tracked the unravelling of its protagonist’s mental state via cutaways to a rabbit gradually putrefying and decomposing. Starve Acre does the opposite, marking the reintegration of a broken family not only by a slow, seasonal shift from dead of winter to life-bringing spring, but also by the miraculous, uncanny reformation of disinterred bones into a living, breathing, fully fleshed and undeniably sinister hare. But as Juliette resorts to unconventional remedies for her sorrow, and the less communicative Richard withdraws into obsessive excavation work around the property, their guilt and recrimination will gradually birth something mysterious and malevolent that requires a sacrifice to fill the Willoughbys’ void.

Like Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary (1989), Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb (2021), Starve Acre uses genre to explore the aching psychology of loss, but it also comes deeply embedded in English folk traditions, even if they are, like the opening quote, partly or even wholly invented. What happens at the farm might be taken as a descent into a madness whose shared nature signifies the couple’s enduring, unhinged commitment to one another, or it might be their dazed participation in an ancient ritual of renewal that has waited generations to spread fresh shoots, nourished by their grief. Either way, this slow-burning chiller, unnervingly scored by Matthew Herbert, exhumes something primeval and toxic at the very roots of a once, and perhaps again, happy family.

► Starve Acre is in UK cinemas 6 September.