"I don’t really know what’s happening anymore" cries an anguished Matt Smith an hour or so into Starve Acre. And indeed, such is the fug of indistinct menace and metaphysical mystery in Daniel Kokotajlo’s follow-up to 2017’s Apostasy that your immediate response to his woeful declaration may be to nod instinctively in agreement.
Like the 2019 novel by Andrew Michael Hurley from which it evolved though, Starve Acre is not a work one has to fully comprehend in order to be seduced. It is more of a mood piece, in truth: one that transports the viewer to a muddy vision of '70s Yorkshire in which nature itself seems inexplicably, implacably opposed to the very presence of archaeologist Richard (Smith), his wife Juliette (Morfydd Clark), and their troubled young son Owen (Arthur Shaw).
