Award-winning director Daniel Kokotajlo made a real impression five years ago with his fiercely distinctive debut feature, Apostasy, set in an enclosed religious world. Here is his diverting but frankly more generic follow-up, adapted from the novel by Andrew Michael Hurley. It is billed as contemporary folk horror but borders on film-school pastiche, and “contemporary” means set in the era of The Wicker Man in the early 70s – a British world of brown corduroy, Austin 1100s, no central heating, odd locals and a persistent, sinister encroaching gloom in the countryside. The movie teeters on a knife-edge between scary and silly, and yet without that weird flavour of silly, the scares wouldn’t mean as much.
Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark, two very potent and formidable screen presences, play Richard and Juliette, an unhappy couple who in the time-honoured tradition of Don’t Look Now experience a family tragedy with their young son, with Juliette coming under the influence of a mysterious local woman (not blind, though) and Richard obsessively throwing himself into his work.
Richard is an archaeologist who has moved his family from the big city to his late father’s house on the Yorkshire moors: the bleak place where he grew up, with the unimprovably creepy name of Starve Acre. Juliette has amiably gone along with this new move, believing that the healthy countryside would be good for their son. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Richard is to become increasingly preoccupied with digging on the site of a now vanished oak tree on his land, a place of great significance and the nexus of myths about a local folk devil, gossiped about by a neighbour, Gordon – a muscular, forthright performance from Sean Gilder. Richard broods over his late father’s papers and his recovered memories of this man’s abusive obsessions.
Along with a clamorous musical score, there are eerie closeups on the occult undergrowth and the assumed force that through the green fuse drives the flower of darkness. In a box of his father’s, Richard finds the bones of a hare that starts de-decomposing into satanic life, perhaps inspired by Richard Kelly’s classic Donnie Darko. Opinions may divide about exactly how frightening or interesting this ersatz child creature – created with digital effects and model work – actually is, given that so much emphasis is placed on it (Valdimar Jóhannson’s recent film Lamb handled these ideas a bit more interestingly). I have to admit there is an effective, old-fashioned jump scare earlier in the drama, as Juliette falls asleep in front of a 60s adaptation of Hamlet on TV, having amusingly criticised Michael Caine’s performance as Horatio, and awakens to the harsh fizz of white noise.
Smith and Clark, at the head of a very capable supporting cast, keep the movie on an even dramatic keel, with intelligent, thought-through performances putting life back into some familiar tropes.
• Starve Acre screened at the London film festival, and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 6 September.
