Published Sep 5, 2026, 11:41 PM EDT
Miranda Adama is a writer, variety streamer, and all-around creative who loves violence on screen and what it says about pop culture. She’s the host of Be Seeing You: A John Wick Podcast and has been featured on podcasts like Motherfoclóir, Girls Gone Canon, and Tights & Fights.
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With its 1970s setting, Starve Acre is a modern folk horror that leans into its inevitable comparisons with films like The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now. Even so, Starve Acre becomes more a litmus test of dread – for audiences and characters alike – than a formulaic folk horror. Where folk horror films like Midsommar invoke a kind of thrill in piecing together what tapestries and paintings will come to mean, Starve Acre forces viewers to see it coming and to sit in that unease. Director **Daniel Kokotajlo **supports his environment of disquietude with still shots of Yorkshire’s beautiful, but oppressive landscapes between the slow, deliberate camerawork that punctuates the story.
Streaming on Shudder, Starve Acre features **Richard (House of the Dragon’s Matt Smith) and Juliette (**Morfydd Clark, Rings of Power and **Saint Maud) as a couple. They move back to Richard’s childhood home in the countryside of Yorkshire to give their son, Owen, fresh country air to help with his severe asthma. But two years into their move, Owen still hasn’t adjusted to country life and his behavior takes a turn for the worse. This culminates with stabbing the eye out of a horse. In a visit with a child psychologist, Juliette reveals that lately, Jack has mentioned an imaginary friend named Jack Grey. This unsettles Richard, who is no stranger to Jack Grey. It’s a name from his childhood, featured in the opening poem that sets the course of the film, written by none other than Richard’s father, Neil. Soon, the family experiences death, and the film makes grief a central character and spins Richard’s archaeological position at a university as a vessel for exploring his own childhood abuse.
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Where other modern folk horror presents symbols or the whole of folklore up front with a nod and a wink, Starve Acre jumps straight to tragedy, then spends the last hour of its runtime with a twisting ambiance that doesn’t shy away from the disturbing. Everything – from hidden bones to long-buried tree roots, and of folk horror’s favorite trope, an ominous animal, this time a menacing hare – becomes a tangible presentation of Richard’s childhood abuse and the resulting grief. Perhaps the greatest of these is a cut-down oak tree on the Starve Acre property. Owen is drawn to the remains of the tree, much to Richard’s dismay. What is a mystery to Owen is an immense trigger for Richard. To Richard, it represents the superstitions that his cruel father believed justified the ways he brutalized him from a young age. It was a popular meeting place for Neil and his friends, making it a painful reminder of the many ways his community failed to protect him from his father and, at times, even encouraged him.
The film twists Richard’s own work against him, forcing his comforting, mundane relationship to archaeological research to become a kind of liability that prevents him from walking away from these childhood emotional wounds and the beliefs that his father attached to them. As he finds himself drawn to the bones of a hare among his father’s things, Juliette takes a chance on a medium who uses meditation to navigate her dwindling mental health. Through this contrasting framework – a professional life and a spiritual need – both Richard and Juliette are moved closer to folk tragedy in ominous baby steps.
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
Richard’s revelations about his past are brought to life by Matt Smith with a quiet and stubborn resistance. When memories of his past finally break him, and he opens up about his father’s pagan ramblings and superstitious cruelty, it offers only enough breath to sustain the sinister atmosphere. His unfurling dismay works in harmonious contrast with Morfydd Clark’s transparent portrayal of his wife, Juliette. Similarly to Sissy Spacek in Carrie or Mia Farrow in*** Rosemary’s Baby*, Clark makes an unavoidable breakdown painfully watchable. The few moments of comfort they offer one another are well-calculated by director Daniel Kokotajlo**. As their exploration of the mystery and tragedy of Starve Acre becomes more and more disjointed, it’s clear that togetherness might have been a way out. With revelations about the nature of parenthood and the ways any individual can justify cruelty in the past and the present, Starve Acre makes folk horror and pagan fears as human as emotion.
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