Starve Acre

Although Kokotajlo doesn’t feel entirely at home in the horror genre, he is clearly a talent to be reckoned with. Perhaps he’s at his best when working -- as he did with Apostasy -- with more personal material.

Some pleasingly icky special effects add to the general sense of mouldering menace. Where the picture stumbles, however, is in its almost total lack of effective scares.

Definitively worth checking out.

It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year.

The terrain between pagan folklore and psychodrama is turned over here by hand fork: it’s delicately developed as metaphor, but lacks the crazed tilt into shock it needs for major impact.

But the animatronic hare is lethal in all the wrong ways, being possibly the worst horror film effect since the talking goat in Drag Me to Hell... Be afraid? Unfortunately, no.

Had the plot divulged more of the background, this folk horror could have been both freaky and memorable. What we get instead is a meandering tale of a family coming apart where the narrative only realizes what it wants to do right at the end.

Starve Acre doesn’t surprise us, or ever truly defy the tropes of the Evil Twigs genre, but it’s a well-made and -acted venture dishing up a few earthy chills.

“Starve Acre” is exquisitely atmospheric, offering a fever-dream rendering of the power of anguish to fracture us and to dissolve our connection to reality.

There’s lots to admire in the crafting of this modern British folk horror and fans of the genre may adore the many references but there’s something amiss in the emotional stakes.