Set in rural Yorkshire in the mid-70s, Starve Acre brings together the recent vogue for folk horror with an equally trendy retro quality. The dull shades of net curtains and chunky cardigans offer both a sense of the uncanny and their own kind of earthen chic.
Morfydd Clark and Matt Smith lead an excellent cast that also includes Robert Emms, Sean Gilder and Erin Richards. Clark and Smith play a dissatisfied couple mourning the death of their young son on the old family estate of Starve Acre, while plagued by increasingly creepy omens.
In typical folk horror style, the village locals don’t seem too innocent either, as they draw Clark’s grieving mother into a part-pagan, part-new-age form of therapy. History professor husband Matt Smith does his best to maintain that everything has a rational explanation, but starts to lose himself in his research into ancient folklore. Meanwhile, the legends surrounding a large gnarled tree on the estate soon begin to seem more real than imagined.
