Starve Acre (Daniel Kokotajlo, 2023)

'Tis the spooky season once again. dear fiends.  Let us gather 'round the cauldron and see how many horror films I can watch and review betwixt the 1st of October and Samhain itself.

2024 has been shaping up to be a pretty vintage year for the horror genre, all told.  We've had the Ghostwatch-writ-large Late Night With the Devil, the thieves versus vampiric child frolics of Abigail, a double dose of nunnery-based diabolism with the twin-spin of Immaculate and The First Omen, and at the time of writing your humble author is very much looking forward to seeing Coralie Fargeat's The Substance and E. L. Katz's Azrael.  After last year brought us Evil Dead Rise and the wonderfully idiosyncratic werewolf fable Blackout, it's been wonderfully refreshing after years of substandard Blumhouse efforts, paint by numbers slashers and the approximately four billionth entries in the creaking Paranormal Activity, Conjuring and Saw franchises.

Set like folk horror forebears such as Robin Hardy's seminal classic The Wicker Man in the 1970s, the film is redolent of the decade that fashion forgot; the opening shots including the title credits have the feel of some of Lawrence Gordon Clark's Seventies BBC A Ghost Story for Christmas shorts - especially the contemporary late '70s instalments like Stigma.  We are immediately introduced to our leading couple: college lecturer Richard (former titular Time Lord of Doctor Who and current Targaryen twat of House of the Dragon Matt Smith, playing with a Yorkshire accent so broad that I misheard one of his early lines about going for a "trek over the tarn" as "over the Tyne" - making me momentarily think that this was set further north than it is and worryingly close to home) and Juliette, Jules for short (Morfydd Clark, Galadriel herself from The Rings of Power and star of one of the horror films of recent years that I really need to get around to watching because I'm assured it's good: Saint Maud), 

The couple's seemingly pleasant idyll of sitting under a tree at a village fete is horribly interrupted by a hubbub and they discover to their - and everyone else there's - horror that their son Owen (Arthur Shaw) has done an Equus impersonation and stabbed out a horse's eye with a Pythonesque pointed stick.  This got my back up a bit, as animal cruelty - even feigned - can be a red line for me, which may be odd to some as I've always been fine watching people scream as they're killed and shriek as they're mutilated.  I suppose it's my innate misanthropy was is completely at ease with human beings being stabbed, shredded and torn asunder but not the animals.  Oh, and fuck you Ruggero Deodato and everyone else who ever had real animal cruelty in their films.  Anyway, I instantly hated Owen and was worried that we were going to have another Babadook situation here: that I was going to spend the rest of the movie actively wishing a child character dead and being disappointed and frustrated when he didn't.  This can also be called a Bob from The House by the Cemetery situation.

Happily, I turned out to be wrong in this assessment and the awful sprog departed both this realm of existence and the film fairly early on - but not before he tells his mother that he's disturbed by a whistling in the night from the spectral figure of 'Jack Grey', a folktale figure told to him by neighbour Gordon (Sean Gilder, who to my knowledge I've only seen in two other things: as the Sycorax Leader in Doctor Who's 'The Christmas Invasion' and Bosola opposite Gemma Arterton's magnificent Duchess of Malfi), and gone out in the farmlands with his father who is digging for the roots of Jack's legendary oak tree (Smith's Richard saying "It's a Crinoid" as he fishes out a fossilised shellfish from the bowels of the earth is almost impossible not to [mis-]hear as "Krynoid", conjuring the spectre of a lost story wherein the Eleventh Doctor battled the Seeds of Doom).  After the abominable child has perished via a fatal asthma attack - his mother arriving either tragically too late or timing at just rightly, depending (and that's not just my hatred of the kid talking, there's a nice ambiguity as to whether or not she was really in a rush to rescue the wretched rugrat) - the couple are plunged into depression and assorted coping strategies.  Richard plunges headlong into his obsession with excavating the roots of the mystical oak, whilst Jules is comforted by her sister Harrie (Erin Richards, of Gotham and Being Human and other stuff probably).  Morfydd Clark really is superb in this, by the way: her portrayal of raw grief is pretty palpable and as far as I'm concerned a vindication against her vilification by incel man-baby Youtubers who seem to think that making thumbnails of her with 'comedy' googly eyes is in some way amusing.  I suppose they need someone to castigate now that Jodie Whittaker isn't Doctor Who.

When Richard unearths the buried remains of a hare (serious Wicker Man vibes there) which goes on to - like Smith himself did in 2013 - regenerate, it's flesh and fur growing back over the mouldy old bones as it revivifies (shades of both The Blood on Satan's Claw and The Creeping Flesh), Jules becomes increasingly enamoured of the supernaturally resurrected beast.  Is it Owen returned, reincarnated in lepus form?  Is it Jack, the stuff of both Richard's and Owen's childhood nightmares, taking on a shape to walk (well, hop) amongst us?  Either way, sacrifices will be required.

All said, if you'd previously told me that I'd watch a film wherein the final scene saw Lady Galadriel suckling a hare at her teat (lucky Hartley) whilst Doctor Who smashed Barbara Gordon's head in with a hammer, I'd have thought you extraordinarily unwell.  But here we are, and you were right: I loved it.

Best film that Tigon never made, probably.