The folk-horror revival coughs up another pile of Evil Twigs with Starve Acre (now streaming on Shudder), a big slab of haunted-English-countryside atmospherics based on a novel by Andrew Michael Hurley. OK, to be fair, the movie is less about Evil Twigs than Evil Rabbits, but we’ll get more into that in a bit. Directed and written by Daniel Kokotajlo, the movie stars Morfydd Clark (The Rings of Power) and Matt Smith (House of the Dragon) – a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies reunion, if anyone’s keeping track – playing a married couple living on a patch of godforsaken grass in the middle of nowhere that’s up to its armpits in a creaky old pagan curse, which is sorta the British equivalent of learning your house in suburban Kalamazoo is built atop an Indian burial ground. This is never a good situation to be in, you know, as movies like this inevitably make very clear.
The Gist: By the look of things, it’s the late ’70s, although fairly common-sense psychology may have yet to reach the deeply rural community out in British Egypt where Jules (Clark) and Richard (Smith) live with their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw). See, Richard grew up in this house on this land, the very same house and land where his father was an awful human being to him. The very same house and land that’s surely haunted with awful traumatic memories that most of us would want to be very, very far from, so as not to be constantly reminded of them. But it has a really big yard – some acres, it seems – and lots of lore, so it’s a pending dig project for Richard, who’s an archaeology prof. I mean, the metaphor is right there, just begging Richard to not dig up anything you might not want to find.
But without these judgmentary lapses, we’d have no movie, so here we are – and besides, pointing out logical inconsistencies in horror films is the act of a killjoy, and I heretofore apologize for participating in the pissing-on of any picnics. Anyway, it may come to absolutely no surprise to us objective movie-watchers when little Owen begins exhibiting unusual behavior, evidenced by how he takes a sharp stick and pokes out the eye of a pony during a community gathering. Yes, yipes. Mom and Dad take the boy to doctors and psychologists because they have yet to realize that SCIENCE IS NO GOOD AROUND HERE, MU-HAHAHAHAH. Jules mentions how Owen muttered something in his sleep about someone called “Jack Grey,” an entity of local folklore that Richard really doesn’t want to talk about. He blames it on the blatherings of a local old fart, Gordon (Sean Gilder), who knew Richard’s father and occasionally drops by to be nice, and, as the movie progresses, nice and creepy.
I’m going to skip ahead so as not to spoil anything, but suffice to say, nothing good happens. In fact, terrible things happen, culminating in significant misery for our principals. Jules shows signs of being possessed, while her visiting sister Harrie (Erin Richards) stands agape with concern. Richard, meanwhile, throws himself into the yard-dig, getting rather obsessed with the mega-metaphor on hand. This is when the rabbit happens. The sinister rabbit, the bones of which Richard painstakingly unearths, then watches with puzzled fascination as flesh magically regenerates on the skeleton. This is not normal. Prior to this, Richard and Jules’ marriage showed significant signs of strain, but they seem to be brought back together by this dead-eyed animal. We’re a happy family, we’re a happy family, we’re a happy family, me, Mom and Daddy!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Night of the Lepus! More seriously, though: The Omen informs Owen a bit. The Evil Twigs give off the loamy whiff of everything from The Wicker Man to Antlers. And you can’t have a bunny-centric horror film without conjuring the specter of The Witch, Donnie Darko or Inland Empire.
Performance Worth Watching: The intensity of Clark and Smith’s performances make it easy to be drawn into the dread oddity of this film.
Memorable Dialogue: Harrie gets an eyeful of what’s going on, and sums up the movie: “It’s f—in’ weird, Jules.”
Sex and Skin: A PG-13-worthy sex scene and a moment that reminded me of the cover of Tori Amos’ album Boys for Pele, and I’ll leave it at that.
Our Take: However, contrary to Harrie’s observation, Starve Acre isn’t quite weird enough. And despite all that ominous-bunny silliness – and the bunny is played by an animatronic puppet that lends the film an intentional-or-otherwise surreal flourish – it’s a fairly serious film, its plot stoking the fires of grief, loss and trauma before deviating into murkier thematic waters. No comedy is intended here, necessarily. While lepus shenanigans are a welcome diversion from the recent psychologycore trend, they result in an ideological deadlock between the film’s emotional overtures and its giggleworthy supernatural effluvia.
Tonally, though, Kokotajlo keeps proceedings grim with invisible looming oppression and depression. He admirably nurtures creepy atmospherics and a slow-burn narrative with no real sudden moves outside a single jump scare – the characters just start acting weirder and weirder in small increments until you look back from the point of no return and see a clear path to madness. It’s rife with mythological inferences, and it wisely explains nothing and infers everything. I found it absorbing and mildly fascinating, piquing curiosity and keeping me engaged. It ends with a bit of a shrug, but at least it offers no overt clarity with regards to the story’s core mystery. We’ll leave that to another brand of killjoy.
Our Call: Starve Acre doesn’t surprise us, or ever truly defy the tropes of the Evil Twigs genre, but it’s a well-made and -acted venture dishing up a few earthy chills. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.