Starve Acre With HoTD Star Matt Smith: Where to Watch & Is It Even Good?
Love slow-burners? Then this movie is for you.
A new folk horror movie, Starve Acre, has hit the screens, bringing together two actors from this year's two main TV shows – Matt Smith from House of the Dragon and Morfydd Clark from The Rings of Power.
Starve Acre is based on the novel by author Andrew Michael Hurley, who specializes in dark adaptations of British folklore. The director and co-writer was Daniel Kokotajlo, for whom Starve Acre was the second feature film after Apostasy, which was highly praised by both critics and viewers.
What is Starve Acre About?
In the 1970s, ten-year-old Owen, not for the first time after moving to the country, tells his mother that sometimes an invisible friend talks to him. Concerned about her son's hallucinations, Juliette asks her husband to go to the clinic and get a full examination from the local doctors.
Richard does not agree with his wife's decision – he believes that it is necessary to accept and love his son as a whole, with all his oddities, and not to try to correct him. A few days later, Owen suddenly falls dead on the porch of his own house, dividing parents into two camps.
Juliette turns to a local witch for help, and Richard opens his father's boxes – he is sure that with their help he will be able to bring his son back to life.
Starve Acre is a Slow-Burner that Keeps You on Your Toes the Whole Time
Of all the folk horrors, Stave Acre is more like the meditative and mesmerizingly beautiful Enys Men and Gaia than the genre hits The Witch, Midsommar, and The Wicker Man.
The pagan spirits here do not appear with the help of rituals – they gain strength silently. In the middle of the movie, the director slows down the narrative completely, allowing the camera to focus on the wet earth, then on the devastated faces of grieving parents. So if you like dynamics, Starve Acre will simply seem boring, despite the beauty of the withering nature that surrounds Smith and Clark.
One of the sub-genres of the new wave of horror is the slow-burner and Starve Acre epitomizes this genre.
We follow the lives of two parents in the wilderness as they try to find hope and harmony in a destructive family. The threat is there all the time, but it is not shown until the very end, which is why the tension is maintained throughout the movie.
Where to Stream Starve Acre?
Starve Acre is already available for streaming on Prime Video and Apple TV.