Starve Acre as a name implies a certain thin austerity, a place of wuthering, of grit and suffering. With its setting of sometime in the 1970s (a closer second viewing would allow me to identify some of the radio news we hear, and therefore place the film’s setting more accurately) there is the spectre of economic austerity in Britain, of power cuts and strikes. And yet, for Richard (Matt Smith), academia is still a fairly generous place, where you can have long hair and smoke out the staff room window in a sports coat. He and Juliette (Morfydd Clark) move with their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) from central Leeds to the remote farmhouse of Starve Acre, and all of those 1970s earth tones suddenly seem at home in that place: ochre, orange, grey, and warm lights that make the house feel like a cave or a shrine. As with so much folk horror (The Wicker Man, The VVitch, even In The Earth) it is the land that is giving up its secrets, and people who live close to that land are in deep communion with the spirits of the place.
When I was considering whether to try and catch this film at the cinema, my pal Ashley sealed the decision for me by telling me the score by Matthew Herbert was really intense: and it is doing a lot and by a lot I mean it’s been a while since a score made me shiver. Not since my first viewings of the wonderful Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968) with its vengeful cat demon women and the bleakly sinister Mica Levi-scored sci-fi horror Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013) have I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck just from hearing an eerily designed piece of music.
There are certain flavours and aromas that are evoked in Starve Acre, but one that caught me right away was the presence of After Eights, the texture of that crinkly paper and the enticing combination of dark chocolate with pale mint. I remember these being quite sophisticated when I was growing up, alongside Ovations (which came in both mint and orange flavours), like chocolate cigarettes so deliciously forbidden. With an Ovation in one hand, one might practice being grown up. But it is Richard who meditatively eats an After Eight in his study, as he combs through his father’s archive of notebooks.
In addition to the legacy of folk horror, there are two other films that reverberated for me while watching Starve Acre: Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (which I’ve written about previously for Visual Aroma), with its spectre of the cruel father. In Peeping Tom, Mark (Carl Boehm) reveals that he was his father’s experimental subject, constantly surveyed, his behaviour filmed and modified. Much like Richard, he has kept his father’s strange and terrible archive, and through that archive he revisits the things that happened to him as a boy. But none of these men can truly make sense of what happened to them, and in part that is because there is no sense to be made of these experiences—they exist in the wake of the things that were done to them.
Mark and Richard as children are as helpless as the hare we encounter in Starve Acre, with its golden eyes and fur musk. This is the hare’s kingdom: the fox and the sheep, Juliette’s sister’s little dog, fair isle knits and brown corduroy, yellow flowers too early in the spring, and snow on the fields sealing off the house. When the roots of an ancient oak tree are discovered in the yard, we can smell the wet mud, the wood that seems somehow to still be alive after all this time.
Like its predecessors, Starve Acre is a domestic story as well as a pagan one, and Morfydd Clark brings the same luminous intensity to Juliette as she does to her role in Rose Glass’ Saint Maud. Juliette seems a tender innocent, and the way she addresses Owen by the endearment ‘lovely’ (as in ‘won’t you tell me about it, lovely?) tells us so much about her way of practicing care for those around her. I think about the practice of care a lot more than I used to; speaking with an old friend on Saturday night, we were both reflecting on how neither of us had never felt we wanted children. But I also told her that now I see what might be read as maternal qualities or gestures manifesting in other ways in my life, in the care that I extend towards friends and intimates, in offers of food, hospitality, touch and other physical intimacies.
What folk horror often promises is deep communion with unseen forces, and that force is quite often the land itself; it’s the feeling you get when you think you are alone in the woods, or when you stand in a graveyard at a crepuscular hour. As we approach the Autumn equinox and Samhain, it is almost like you can smell and feel the veil thinning: summer plants are dying back, but apples, pears, and quinces are ripening. I see you in your waistcoats and velvets, your jewel tones and deep blacks. It is time to make your offering, lovely.