Starve Acre

Bunroaming

Starve Acre
UK 2023 (2024 releaase)
Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo
BFI/BBC Film

Warning: Tried to talk around the spoilers but they may have crept in regardless.

Starve Acre is a new folk horror movie from director Daniel Kokotajlo. Now, I’m not as enamoured of the folk horror sub-genre as I perhaps should be, mainly because it’s often quite clumsily rendered. I think what a good folk horror film should do is bring in a slow, haunting strangeness for the first half of the movie, steeped in locale specific folklore, before stepping up the pacing and leaning into the fantasy element, which would then start building for the last half of the movie. And so I’m very pleased to say this is exactly what Kokotajlo does with this tale and it works really well, conjuring up a nicely unsettling film with a couple of worrisome beats near the start which set up the strangeness of the rest of the story as it unfolds.

Now, I have to be honest here... I didn’t realise this was set in the 1970s (I had to look it up, too) until I finally twigged nobody was using a mobile phone in the picture so it might be set in the past. I think I’m kinda period blind to anything taking place after about 1930 because fashion styles all look pretty much what I’d be wearing after that date, to be honest. It’s also set in Yorkshire which, I also had to look up to find out what accent the main lead and many other characters are speaking in. I’m also assuming Starve Acre is the place where they all live because, no real mention is made of the title in the dialogue anywhere, that I heard.

Anyway, the film concerns Richard (played by the great Matt Smith with said Yorkshire accent) and his wife Juliette (played by the brilliant Morfydd Clark from Saint Maud, reviewed by me here) who have, two years prior to events portrayed here, moved back into the area where Richard’s father raised him (in somewhat unusual and traumatising ways, it transpires). They have a young son and, you can tell right from the opening that he’s not quite right because, at a local gathering/activity, he pokes out a donkey’s eye. This obviously worries the parents who want to put him into psychological evaluation but, it’s not long after this that something else significant happens and a few seconds of just a black frame denotes a timescale shift of... some months after this specific incident.

Juliette’s sister Harrie, played by Erin Richards, comes to stay with them for a bit as Juliette is suffering from depression... as is Richard, who buries himself in his archeological work revolving around the people who used to live in the area years ago and their use/worship of a once powerful oak tree which had some significance to them, the roots of which Richard thinks he may have found in he earth near to where they live (he has been given a year’s leave from the local university at which he teaches, due to an earlier incident). When a non-human skeleton of... some description (spoilers, I suspect) which he has dug up begins to regenerate organs, things start to take a turn for the strange and uncanny, leaning into the folk horror more as Richard and Juliette come under the spell of whatever is going on and Harrie is discovering that not all the locals who live in the neighbourhood are necessarily what they seem (another important ingredient of folk horror, I reckon).

And it’s an absolutely fine film. It’s suitably creepy and there are some nice shots of the landscape, which is often filmed in ways you wouldn’t expect, with close ups of details (on the interior shots as well, such as concentrating on the hand of an actress first, before giving any kind of establishing shot). The camerawork does feel like it’s very voyeuristic a lot of the time. Like a lurking, perhaps menacing presence is watching all that transpires in a fly on the wall kind of way.  

The actors are all terrific, of course. Matt Smith seems to be playing it very differently from many of his signature roles and somehow manages to nullify any baggage from other movies or TV performances he might have been carrying... you totally believe in this man drowning in his own despair. Ditto for the brilliant Morfydd Clark, who goes from giving up on the world to the confident, feminine Earth power she needs to be for the sinister enchantment of the film to be able to work effectively. And as for Erin Richards, well, she doesn’t have quite as much chance to shine in the spotlight as the other two but she certainly does a great job... in particular and without giving anything away, the last ten seconds or so you see of her character is absolutely unsettling and a brilliant physical performance. I can’t say anymore for fear of spoiling the ending of the movie.

And all this, coupled with Matthew Herbert’s folksy terror scoring means that Starve Acre is a wonderful viewing experience and absolutely something that the great Severin Films in the US should be considering including when they get around to putting together the inevitable All The Haunts Be Ours Volume 3 box set in a couple of years time (I suspect). This one is up there with the best of these kinds of movies and it’s always great to see something made by film-makers who absolutely understand the power of the sub genre and know how to deliver. Also... and excuse me for being cryptic but spoilers need to be jumped on here... it doesn’t quite go the full Monty Python And The Holy Grail, but it comes pretty close. I absolutely loved this one.

Saint Maud

Burning Faith

Saint Maud
UK 2019 Directed by Rose Glass
Escape Plan Productions

Well, this film is absolutely amazing.

Saint Maud is the feature debut (after helming a few shorts) of the writer/director Rose Glass and, it has to be said, I’m a little worried for her. Simply because, whenever a first time director debuts with a film this perfect, you have to wonder when in their careers they are going to come up with the inevitable dud and how it will affect them. This is, frankly, an astonishing piece of art. Not least because, in some ways, it doesn’t take any prisoners when it comes to challenging the audience to bring their own baggage to the party. Indeed, the final shot of the film, which I won’t go into here because I don’t want to drop any major spoilers, doesn’t pull the rug away from the audience... or even tries to have it’s cake and eat it at the same time... it just forces you to reflect inwards on your personal interpretation of the events that take place in the movie. Or maybe it doesn’t and I’m just reading too much into it so, apologies to the director if there is supposed to be a clear stance on this movie and I just didn’t see it.

The film stars Morfydd Clark as Maud (and when I say ‘stars’, I really mean it), who is a private carer coming to look after a dying dance choreographer called Amanda, played by Jennifer Ehle. Following on from an opening sequence giving us our first look at a troubled back story for Maud, which will become more apparent as the movie progresses and flashes back to it a few times, she accepts her assignment along with her new found religious visions of a loving but testing God. And that’s where the doubt creeps in for the audience because, at first, it’s easy to take Maud’s heavily religious slant as a possible mental aberration of the character but, as the film unfolds, you’ll find the imagery the director chooses to confront the audience with quite pointed in some ways but, similarly, also quite untrustworthy in it credibility as soon as we see possible signs that Maud is in some way God’s chosen one.

And, I really won’t say anything more about the story barring that initial set up because a) I really don’t want to ruin anything about this one and b) there’s more than enough other stuff to talk about in terms of how the film has been shot and presented that I don’t have to resort to concentrating too much on the story.

Right from the opening prologue I could tell I was in good hands. The director seems to have an obsession with junctions creating central vertical lines such as... well, especially... the corners of rooms. But the other thing she does is either look down or up slightly at the content of the frame for quite a lot of the film (surely at least half the shots of the film are taken from a viewpoint slightly above or below the subject of a shot). It also pulls you into the picture even more when the shot changes to another scene and you are suddenly looking down at the character in a deeper shot, such as walking up or down a big flight of stairs in the surrounding neighbourhood. And it’s this, I believe, which is one of those things, completely subconsciously, that starts to nicely unsettle the viewer as the film unfolds.

You know how Arthur Penn deliberately withholds the establishing shots in Bonnie And Clyde so that, when you do finally see a decent one, the relief for the audience is coupled to a sense of empathy with the central outlaws of the film? Well, I believe that’s very similar to what Glass does here, where the majority of the establishing shots are at an angle so that, when the occasional shot does come from straight on in front of a subject... and they get more frequent as the film progresses so might well be, I suspect, a metaphor for Maud’s ‘spiritual journey’ as told in the choices of angles... you do get a sense of ‘finally, something which isn’t off kilter’ when they happen.

And as I say, they’re frequent at first but they’re not the only device the director uses to unsettle us. She seems to display a penchant for those corner angles and reflects them excessively in the use of geometric patterns on screen, with the wallpaper in Maud’s bedroom at the place she is working really throwing it up there from early on. This all comes to a head about ten minutes into the movie, when Maud sits in a cafe and the angular verticals of the windows seem almost overkill and really pushing the visual point... by which I mean, the shot looks exquisite and, once again, made me grin.

There’s a big ‘bam’ of a moment which starts off what I shall simply refer to as the ‘Christ’s temptation in the Judaean Desert’ sequence, where Maud falls into the darkness which is almost comical in its resemblance to Taxi Driver. You know that shot where, if memory serves because it’s been decades since I last saw it (mental note... re-watch it for this blog), Scorcese suddenly cuts to the ‘street musician’ banging on the drums to give us this jarring edit? The same thing happens here and then the scenes, filmed around areas of Scarborough which I remember from holidaying there over the years, almost takes on the browns, reds and oranges of ‘Scorcese-land’ for the rest of the sequence.  

And even when the shots are taken straight on, there is usually something just slightly off about them. For example, in a conversation between Maud and Amanda at one point, we see Maud’s head in the centre of the frame but then realise it’s just a little over to the left of the shot. After cutting to Amanda, we see she’s just a little right of the centre of the shot. From then on though, when we cut back to Maude, we see she’s framed quite a bit more to the left than earlier in the shot and this kind of pitching of elements against each other in places where the eye needs to play catch up (which is a trick I wouldn’t want to brave in a widescreen aspect ratio for fear of popping the audience out of the movie), forces the viewer to adapt to the constant visual shifts and its an uneasy alliance between viewer and film-maker. At least that’s how it felt to me.

There’s even a moment when a slab of a rectangle of an alleyway, with Maud walking down it and black screen on either side, is presented initially as a horizontal strip within the shot before we see it, very slowly, turn 10 or so degrees anti-clockwise within the frame. The director is really making  our minds work throughout this movie and, frankly, I was pleased to have the exercise.

Added to this, the director uses deliberately arresting imagery which almost teases the audience. So a close up on a bubbling bowl of soup recalls the bloody incident as yet fully unrevealed at the start of the picture (and it’s a shot which comes in the first minute or two as a segue into a time shift). Similarly, the angle of a head on a gurney, the long hair hanging down to the ground and dripping with blood, is beautifully echoing the angle of Amanda’s head and hanging hair in one of her old dance routines, even used as a poster to promote one of her shows. These nice visual echoes occur throughout and, even if this thing had no story, I’d still call it the best new film I’ve seen in the last 12 months because the imagery is so rich in terms of the design and placement of objects against the environment within each scene.

And, all those visuals are complemented by some good sound design and an absolutely blisteringly great score by Adam Janota Bzowski which, alas, is not available on a proper CD. So, you know, I won’t get to listen to it away from the movie, which is a shame (hey film companies... don’t try and foist your lousy vinyl and digitally lacking downloads at me, we need this released in a real format please).

The music just adds to the way the director builds tension by pitching our expectations of the character of Maud against the powder keg we know she can become. This makes for some very suspenseful scenes and you will possibly, like me, be fearing for the lives of some of the other people in the movie because you really can’t always keep track of where Maud is, mentally (although the settling down of the visual design should maybe help at certain points). Of course, some of that credit is due to the sheer brilliance of the performance of the central character. When I first started watching Morfydd playing Maud as the repressive, disciple of God she presents herself to us as, I thought to myself, “Yeah, quite a good actress... she’s doing a good job here.” However, when you see her become a normal, screwed up person during her ‘last temptation’ sequence, the one I mentioned earlier, you realise just how brilliant an actress she really is playing this part. If somebody this year deserves some kind of award for acting (and regular readers will know I really hate awards so don’t take this stuff lightly), then Morfydd Clark wholeheartedly deserves to get one. This is an amazing performance.

But then again, Saint Maud is an amazing film and Rose Glass deserves a huge round of applause for this and, yeah, I really want to know where she is going to go next with her art. This is a film I will certainly be visiting again over the years. I can’t really class it as a horror film (although some people will definitely go there with their genre classifications) because I’m just not sure that the ‘Maud’s eye view’ of the reality of the situation in certain scenes is necessarily the real story and, like I said, the very last shot of the film compounds that uncertainty to an extent. Frankly, though, I don’t care what genre people want to stick the film into... it’s enough for me that it’s plain brilliant. If you’re into the art of cinema, then this is truly one you won’t want to miss.