I desperately want to love Starve Acre, director David Kokotajlo’s 2023 folk horror feature based on the Andrew Michael Hurley novel. I love the genre and I love the cast, led by Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark. I even really liked some of the film’s more effective imagery and its haunting atmosphere. At the same time it is cursed by a slow, somewhat tedious pace and an oblique, maddeningly vague attitude to its narrative and back story. Sometimes you can simply obfuscate too much, and any mystery you are attempting to generate is simply going to be off-putting.

Clark and Smith play Juliette and Richard, a married couple who have moved to the former home of Richard’s dead father. After their young son commits an act of horrible violence, Richard’s harrowing past is brought to light and his marriage to Juliette becomes sorely tested.

A lot of things seem to happen in Starve Acre not because of character or story, but because they are sorts of thing that happen in folk horror. Local superstitions get mentioned but not explained. Supernatural happenings occur but seem to lack content or explanation. It is possible these things are included in Hurley’s novel, but they certainly do not seem foregrounded in the film. There is a fine line to good fiction of this kind, one that separates explanations from the inexplicable. Too much of one or the other and the text suffers; here there is simply not enough context or foreshadowing for the film to be fully effective. There also seems to be an awful lot of incident packed into the final half hour, and that creates a rather hollow and uneventful build-up for the first hour or so. The 1970s setting, while reasonably well-presented, feels rather moribund and par for the course for British folk horror generally.

Morfydd Clark is back playing growing mental instability, just like she famously did in 2019’s Saint Maud and performed about as effectively as in that film. Matt Smith plays his role at a strong intensity and a depressing mood, which is a quite a strong contrast from many of his earlier roles – Doctor Who included. There are decent supporting performances by Sean Gilder and Erin Richards, but for the bulk of its running time the film seems very focused on Richard and Juliette’s failing marriage.

Horror elements are limited, to my mind a little too much, but when they arrive they are original and rather striking. Events following Richard’s excavation of a hare’s skeleton are particularly arresting, but as with everything else it ultimately feels like too little done too late in the piece.

Decent performances, good characters, and a bleak atmosphere all work well in Starve Acre‘s favour. The structure, the pace, and the actual nuts-and-bolts plot underneath it all work in the other direction. What is left in the middle is effective in parts but ultimately a disappointing watch. There is a long, incredibly rich history of British folk horror cinema, and Starve Acre simply fails to make the desired grade.