Film review

  • Starve Acre

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daniel Kokotajlo (2023)

    Judging chiefly from the tank tops in evidence, the time is the 1970s.  The place is somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales.  Richard Willoughby (Matt Smith), his wife Juliette (Morfydd Clark) and their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) have moved there from Leeds; in Richard’s case, moved back there – he grew up in this rural area, where his father bought land.  A university teacher and researcher, Richard now lives in the farmhouse where he grew up.  Juliette keeps chickens and wants to branch out into sheep or goats.  Owen, however, is an increasing worry to his parents.  He’s asthmatic.  When he goes to bed at night, he hears someone whistling.  At a village fair, other children are terrified as a white pony lies groaning in pain after being blinded in one eye; Richard and Juliette find their son sitting alone nearby, holding a piece of sharp, bloodstained wood.  They take him to a psychiatrist (Roger Barclay), who does a brain scan on the child.  Not long after this, Owen suffers a fatal asthma attack.

    This is how Daniel Kokotajlo’s second feature film begins.  His first, Apostasy (2017), was a fine piece of work and Starve Acre has a fine, evocative title (it refers both to the Willoughbys’ house and to the land in which it stands).  The writer-director’s screenplay is based on Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel of the same name, published in 2019.  By then, Apostasy had made its mark; assuming he already had some other possibilities in mind, Kokotajlo must have been very impressed by Hurley’s novel to choose it as his next film project.  For a while, Starve Acre raises hopes that he’ll be able to blend an upsetting human story with the material’s folk-horror aspect – dramatising the madness of grief experienced by parents who have lost a child.  But the old-weird-England paraphernalia gradually gains the upper hand and overwhelms the film.

    It’s significant that Richard Willoughby’s academic field is archaeology – even the word ‘field’ is significant.  Richard thinks Gordon (Sean Gilder), a friend of his late father who still lives locally, is an undesirable influence on Owen.  While they’re on a walk together, Richard tells his son that the roots of an old oak tree lie beneath the field they’re crossing.  Owen says he already knows this from Gordon and that ‘the oak tree’s spirit was like a doorway into worlds’.  Richard pooh-poohs this – ‘superstitions are silly ideas people made up before we understood how things really worked’ – but readily agrees when Owen suggests they find out where the tree’s roots are.  Despite unhappy memories of his own father and his professed rationalism, Richard is fascinated by a book that his father put together – jottings, drawings and poems about ancient local customs and folklore.  In the aftermath to Owen’s death he delivers on his promise to his son to start digging in the field.  He excavates animal bones and pieces them together, like a macabre jigsaw, to construct a complete hare skeleton.  He warms this by the fire and the creature returns to life, fur and all.  Richard eventually digs deep enough to uncover the roots of the tree that, according to his father’s writings, villagers cut down as a means of ‘sealing short access to the womb of nature … the pagan’s entrance to the spirit world’.  What’s left of the tree trunk is astonishingly well preserved.  ‘The faculty should be funding this,’ says Steven (Robert Emms), Richard’s colleague who comes to Starve Acre to inspect and help with the dig.

    In other words, the pagan roots underlying the surface of the modern world are buried but far from dead.  Owen calls his bedtime whistler Jack Grey, a name already known to Richard from his father’s book.  Also known as Dandelion Jack, he’s the spirit of some kind of ancient evil embedded in the landscape.  It emerges that Richard’s father tried to sacrifice his son in order to propitiate Jack.  The attempt failed, according to Gordon, because Richard’s father didn’t love his son – only a much-loved son will satisfy Jack so Owen fits the bill.  Not that Richard tried to sacrifice him; he was out at work at the time of the fatal asthma attack.  Juliette was at home, though, standing in the farmhouse doorway, her gaze fixed on the landscape beyond, her mind’s eye seeing blood-red images that, while hard to make out, look to prefigure the glowing fragments of the hare that Richard will resurrect.  Juliette later admits to Richard that, when she found Owen unconscious, she ‘had a moment of clarity that we’d be better off without him’ – but, then, bereavement has driven her crazy by this point.  Unlike Richard, she isn’t averse to Gordon.  It’s he who introduces Juliette to Mrs Forde (Melanie Kilburn), a local woman who comes to the farmhouse to conduct a meditation-cum-exorcism, chanting the mantra ‘Om Vajrapani Hum‘.  Mrs Forde then assures Juliette that ‘the dandelion has bud’ and that Owen ‘has moved on now’.

    This synopsis isn’t meant to be sarcastic.  It’s meant to give a sense of the impossibly heavy eerie-folkloric load that Daniel Kokotajlo is trying to grapple with – against which the human relationships in the story don’t stand a chance.  Juliette’s elder sister, Harrie (Erin Richards), comes to stay at Starve Acre, supposedly to help Juliette get over the tragedy of Owen’s death.  Harrie is forthright and self-assured and brings with her a Pekinese:  you can see why she might be an irritating house guest.  But this isn’t nearly enough to explain her brother-in-law’s strong antipathy to Harrie evident from the moment she arrives.  Richard’s boyhood baggage also gets in Kokotajlo’s way.  He has so much traumatic backstory – Juliette has no backstory – that it’s virtually in competition with his life being turned upside down by his son’s death.

    Even so, Starve Acre might have worked better with a stronger actor than Matt Smith in the main role.  Although his regional accent is fully absorbed, Smith is no more than vocally expressive:  his Richard is so closed off from the start that it’s hard to imagine what normal life, at home or at work, might once have been for him.  Morfydd Clark hints at this more successfully albeit in Juliette’s occasional light-hearted interactions with Harrie rather than in scenes with Richard.  Clark’s previous cinema role was also in a horror story, Rose Glass’s Saint Maud (2019); as in that film, she’s emotionally supple and credible despite the plot extremities.  Erin Richards’ Harrie, during the early part of her stay, evokes a world beyond Starve Acre, as she chatters about the boyfriend who’s cleaned her out of Pomerol or the film actors she fancies (Gene Hackman, surprisingly enough) or doesn’t fancy (Michael Caine).  Kokotajlo doesn’t supply a good reason, though, for this bossy, candid woman to stick around as things get weirder – it’s not even suggested that Harrie, against her better judgment, gets sucked into what’s turning into a madhouse.  Robert Emms, brilliant in Apostasy, hasn’t much to do but looks and sounds very right in the university common room.  Some actors in period clothes and accoutrements can’t disguise the fact that they’re in costume:  Emms completely inhabits his sports jacket and sideburns – he’s thoroughly 1970s (except when Steven says anachronistically, ‘No worries’).

    The main problem in Starve Acre’s cast is the hare redevivus, which is decidedly animatronic.  That said, Corey the Pekinese, a real dog (called Derek), looks electromechanical, too.  Corey is the film’s surprise survivor, given that it’s such common screen practice to kill off pet animals.  The humans here don’t fare so well.  Steven is stabbed to death by Juliette.  Harrie is killed with a hammer blow to the head from Richard, when Juliette gives him the nod.  They end up adopting the hare as their new baby:  Juliette puts it in a bath then breast-feeds it.  Daniel Kokotajlo is a talented film-maker and I still want to see what he does next.  I really hope, though, that he moves well away from the Starve Acre neighbourhood.

    2 December 2024

  • All We Imagine as Light

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Payal Kapadia (2024)

    From the start, writer-director Payal Kapadia’s description of Mumbai, where she was born, raised and educated, is different from – to cite the obvious example – outsider Danny Boyle’s splashy portrait of the place in Slumdog Millionaire (2008).  In the prologue to All We Imagine as Light, the camera moves swiftly through a frenetic street market and onto packed commuter trains; on the soundtrack, the voices of newcomers to Mumbai explain why they came to the city or their first impressions of it.  A docker says he found the foul smell of the waterfront overpowering, a woman that the busy streets helped her subdue her sadness.  Kapadia observes in a quasi-documentary style, conveying grimy heat and local colour without overstressing the one or romanticising the other.  She focuses on a succession of faces before settling on a fortyish woman on a train.  This is Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a hospital nurse, who will be the film’s central character and consciousness.

    Anu (Divya Prabha), the younger work colleague who shares Prabha’s tiny rented flat, will also be crucial to the story.  These two nurses are both Hindu and originally from Kerala but otherwise clearly distinguished.  They’re of different generations.  Prabha, in an arranged marriage, hasn’t seen her husband in years.  He left to work in Germany soon after they wed but Prabha is almost primly bound by her married state.  She won’t even go to the cinema with other nurses planning to drool at a Bollywood actor.  She keeps her emotional distance from Dr Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), her awkward, sensitive admirer at the hospital.  Anu is readier to enjoy life and consequently low on funds; at the start, Prabha agrees to pay her colleague’s monthly rent again though she warns this’ll be the last time that she does.  Anu’s parents are pushing her to make an arranged marriage but, unbeknown to them, she’s seeing a young Muslim man, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon).  (Prabha is aware of a boyfriend but not that he’s Muslim.)  There’s a third important female character.  Widowed Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital where Prabha and Anu work, has been evicted from her home in a tenement block.  The building is about to be demolished to make way for luxury apartments (‘Class is a privilege:  reserved for the privileged’, the developer’s banner on the site proclaims).  Parvaty has no documents to prove that she and her late husband owned what had been their home for twenty-odd years.

    The structure of those opening sequences isn’t so unusual for a screen drama set in a big city.  It hints at the huge number of different lives that Kapadia could explore until she chooses just one of Mumbai’s more than twenty-one million citizens.  And while it’s a cliché to label the setting of a film a character in itself, that’s apt enough in this case – for positive and less positive reasons.  While Kapadia and Ranabir Das, her cinematographer, certainly animate the city – the buildings, the social life, the weather (it’s monsoon season) – the principals’ interactions, with each other and with other people, are well observed but unexciting.  A rice cooker arrives in the post for Prabha, from Germany.  Shiaz will be home alone when his parents go to a wedding and tells Anu to get hold of a burka to wear in his neighbourhood on the way to the house.  She’s kitted out and on her way when he texts apologetically to call off the tryst:  the wedding has been postponed due to the bad weather.  Prabha and Anu ask Manoj to give their pregnant cat an ultrasound to confirm the number of kittens she’s expecting:  Manoj is so shy in their presence he’s reluctant even to lay his hand on the cat’s belly.  Parvaty persuades well-behaved Prabha to join her in throwing stones at the new building development.

    An elderly hospital patient (Madhu Raja), refusing to take the medication that she tells Prabha is causing nightly visitations from her dead husband, makes a strong impression but isn’t seen again.  When a younger wife and mother (Shweta Prajaparti) explains her husband won’t have a vasectomy, Anu, without being asked, hands the woman contraceptives. The hospital sequences soon peter out, though.  About halfway through, when Kapadia inserts another city montage including further brief voiceovers, I wondered if we were in for just another hour of modest storytelling and, after that, a third, concluding montage.  Instead, Kapadia starts to surprise.  She cuts to a bus journey, as Prabha and Anu help Parvaty move back to the coastal village, near the port city of Ratnagiri, that she hails from.  You expect the pair’s overnight stay in the village to form an interlude before normal Mumbai service is resumed.  In fact, the film – or, at any rate, the camera – never returns to the city.  As All We Imagine as Light changes location, the narrative changes gear, becomes more compelling.

    Anu and Shiaz have decided to rearrange their rendezvous; he’s done a recce of the area that lies behind the seashore and the village.  Anu and he first get together in woodland, where Prabha catches sight of them, and later in a cave, where they have sex.  While this is going on, a commotion on the beach attracts Prabha’s attention.  The body of a man has been dragged from the sea:  the crowd that gathers round thinks he’s dead; Prabha gives him the kiss of life and he revives.  The man (Anand Sami) is taken somewhere nearby to rest; as he sleeps, nurse Prabha tends the cuts on his upper body.  A local woman comes in with food for the man and assumes Prabha is his wife.  Prabha immediately says she’s not but, after the other woman has left and the man has seemingly come to, she has a conversation with him as if he were her husband.  He explains his exhausting life in a German factory – working such long hours, in a place so dark, that he has to imagine the light in the world outside.

    Both these episodes are very well done.  Human figures have been sculpted into the caves:  Anu is magnetised by the expression of a woman who, she says, looks to have been stuck there for ages, waiting for something to happen.  There are graffiti in different languages on the cave walls – the work of other, perhaps forbidden lovers.  When Anu says that Shiaz himself has written one of the Malayalam inscriptions, he doesn’t deny it.  (Like Prabha and Anu, he’s Keralan; most of the film is in Malayalam although Hindi and Marathi feature, too.)  Kapadia films the lovemaking quite discreetly yet the sequence, not least because it’s the only such sequence in the film, is sensually expressive.  Prabha’s dialogue with the man she resuscitates is no less remarkable.  You don’t for a minute think this man really could be her long-lost husband yet the exchange between them makes sense.  After all, Prabha has brought a man back to a life and someone else has assumed he is her husband:  now’s the time to imagine what she would like to say to her husband and what he might say to her.

    Kani Kusruti’s strongly interior acting and Divya Prabha’s effortless changes of mood are highly complementary and effective:  their performance rhythms beautifully capture the temperamental gulf between Prabha, who is solemn, resigned yet tense, and impatient Anu.  Chhaya Kadam is a potent naturalistic performer, too.  Hridhu Haroon’s Shiaz is eager yet uncertain, a winning combination.  Just about everything in the young-love relationship works well.  One of the funniest bits comes when Anu shows Shiaz on her phone photos of the prospective Hindu husbands her parents have sent her, and he launches into sarcastic quick-fire impersonations of the types these men appear to be.  I was sometimes irritated by the piano on the soundtrack (excerpts from ‘The Homeless Wanderer’ by the Ethiopian composer and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam, who died in 2023 in her hundredth year) but there’s no doubting Payal Kapadia has chosen her music with care:  the very different, discordant sounds of the Kolkata musician Topshe are also in evidence.

    The film ends on the beach, as night falls on the village.  Prabha asks the teenager (Saee Abhay Limaye) who runs a café-shack if she’s closing up.  The answer’s no, so Prabha, Parvaty and Anu take a table.  Prabha, more relaxed now, tells Anu she has seen her with her young man.  She suggests that Shiaz join them on the beach and he does.  The four sit comfortably together under the lights of the shack.  Ratnagiri hasn’t eclipsed Mumbai, not least because we know that, when Prabha and Anu return home, they’ll still face the same difficulties they faced twenty-four hours ago.  In other words, nothing is resolved in All We Imagine as Light.  Yet, for both women, something has been achieved.

    29 November 2024

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