‘Starve Acre’ Review: Formidably Freaky New Slab of British Folk Horror Goes Deeper Underground

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic You can smell what’s happening in “Starve Acre” before you puzzle the rest of it out. The grassy, peaty dampness of its rural Yorkshire setting seems to hit the olfactory glands without any scratch-and-sniff assistance, only intensifying as the film unearths its literally deep-buried secrets.

Daniel Kokotajlo‘s impressive second feature unfolds in a vein of British folk horror that has been popular of late — with films from Ben Wheatley’s “A Field in England” to Mark Jenkins’s “Enys Men” all tapping into that retro “Wicker Man” eeriness — but rarely with such rattling sensory specificity or formal refinement.

Starring Morfydd Clark and Matt Smith as former townies unprepared for the full burden of lore they inherit with their desolate farmhouse, it’s a tale of quite outlandish fantastical leaps, grounded by the chills it also finds in common weather and wildlife.

Premiering in the main competition at this year’s London Film Festival, “Starve Acre” marks a somewhat unexpected pivot for writer-director Kokotajlo from his superb 2017 debut “Apostasy,” a tough-minded study of religious conflict in a modern Jehovah’s Witness family that traded in unsparing realism. (You could say both films are fascinated by matters of obsessive, cultish belief.) As it turns out, he’s equally adept with genre whimsy of a punishingly dark stripe — hewing closely to the very literate English gothic of Andrew Michael Hurley’s well-regarded 2019 source novel — while still wielding the sparse filmmaking rigor of his first film.