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
