STARVE ACRE - Mark Reviews Movies

Starve Acre, Brainstorm Media

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | July 25, 2024

At its core, Starve Acre is about grief, but the way in which writer/director Daniel Kokotajilo filters it through the supernatural and folklore keeps the material at an emotional remove. That's part of the point, given the complicated nature of the relationship between the survivors and the deceased, but even then, the movie becomes so focused on its mythology that it barely communicates the central idea on a simple level.

At the center of this tale, set at some point in the 1970s, are the married Richard (Matt Smith) and Juliette (Morfydd Clark). They have moved from a city to the English countryside with their young son Ewan (Arthur Shaw), hoping to help with the boy's asthma. Richard grew up in this place, on a remote farm outside a small village where everyone gathers for an annual fair.

While spending some time alone together on the fairgrounds, the couple hears children screaming in the distance, and upon checking on the situation, the two discover a pony with one its eyes gouged out. Richard finds Ewan sitting by himself, holding a stick. The stick is covered in blood.

The parents don't know what to do about this, obviously. Ewan has gotten into fights at school in the recent past, but Richard argues it was always to protect or defend himself. This incident is something else entirely, though, and the best advice a local doctor can offer is to wait and see if this is a one-time act or the first sign of ongoing behavior.

Part of the distance of the material, adapted from Andrew Michael Hurley, is clearly intentional. It's most apparent in Richard, a professor of archeology at a nearby college and a man who seems to live in a constant state of emotional constipation. He doesn't talk much, except about work, which the move back to his childhood home might help. After all, the countryside used to be home to many ancient peoples, and a short trip from the farm to a stream with Ewan reveals some artifacts from centuries ago.

Richard knows a lot about the history of this place, mainly the past existence of a great oak tree that was used as a meeting place for one of those earlier societies. It's no longer there, but Richard knows the roots are still buried some feet below the surface.

Despite his relative quiet, there's a lot going on with Richard, which we learn in small fragments as he digs, goes through his father's old notes about the ancient customs of the historical settlers of the land, and seems to uncover some truth behind the vague folklore of why that tree was so important. Gordon (Sean Gilder), an old-timer in this place, is an expert on such things, although he denies filling Ewan's head with dark tales about some supernatural entity simply known as "Jack." Those stories, Richard starts to suspect, might explain some of his son's recent behavior.

At this point, it should be noticeable that most of the explanation of the story revolves around myth, and that off-kilter balance, favoring old stories and the suggestion that the tree was a place of sacrifice over matters like these characters and the problem of Ewan's actions, only increases once the plot is set in motion. Ewan has fatal asthma attack, unnoticed by Juliette until it's too late, and soon enough, we realize that even the child and his death are little more than plot devices for this material.

The rest of the story has an inconsolable Juliette living in mourning, even with the support of her sister Harrie (Erin Richards), who decides to stay with the couple to help them. Meanwhile, Richard becomes obsessed with digging up the past—figuratively, in terms of what his father did to him as a result of the old man researching the folklore, and literally, when he spends his days and nights uncovering what's left of the old oak tree.

That neither of these characters talks about the death of their son or the complexity of their grief coupled with feelings that the boy might have become more trouble makes some sense, of course. A scene late in the story, just before the climax takes over with some admirably sinister weirdness, quickly gets at those ideas, but the real attention here is in depicting and attempting to explain the inexplicable possibility that those old folktales might have some basis in reality.

As a result, these characters come across more as caretakers and excavators of the story's lore, instead of people confronting pain and trauma and guilt and everything else that comes from this situation. It doesn't help, obviously, that Kokotajilo literalizes that sentiment about them, since Richard is excavating the site of the tree and eventually becomes the caretaker to an unnatural hare, to which both parents feel a strange bond.

Starve Acre is ultimately a horror tale, of course, and the third act does get at some unsettling ideas about how far these characters are willing to take their belief in the old stories and/or their denial about their son's death. By the time the movie arrives at that point, though, it has spent so much time explaining the back story that the actual story seems like an afterthought.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Book

Buy the Book (Kindle Edition)