Move over, bunnies. The wave of creepy movie rabbits – see Us and The Favourite for pointers – has been surpassed by a longer-limbed beast. Make way for the unsettling movie hare.
The folk-horror revival continues unabated with spring rituals and supernatural lepus. Drawing on such genre cornerstones as The Wicker Man and The Appointment, Daniel Kokotajlo’s impressive second feature taps into ley lines, green-man legend and ancient dark things.
The plot, adapted by the director from a novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, concerns Richard (Matt Smith) and Juliette Willoughby (Morfydd Clark), a couple who have moved from the city to the Yorkshire Dales with their young, troubled son, Owen. In a shocking early sequence, the boy, who claims to hear a voice and whistles over the Pennines, blinds a horse with a sharp stick. His subsequent and sudden death is witnessed by his mother, who fails to intervene. The mourning period is stranger still: Richard, a history professor, channels all his energy into the excavation below an ancient tree.
The grief curdles into something more sinister.
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A hare alarmingly grows from the bones, filling and fattening out into cartilage, flesh and fur. It’s emblematic of a film that deftly embellishes its domestic backstory into a grander mythology.
Ominous hints about Richard’s abusive childhood gesture towards a compellingly unhinged denouement.
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The impressively drab efforts of the costume designer Emma Fryer and Francesca Massariol’s production design make one feel trapped in a grimmer, excised sequence for Ken Loach’s Kes. Clark, a formidable screen presence in Saint Maud and The Personal History of David Copperfield, is well met by Smith as the pair descend into something like possession. A worthy contender in a British revival characterised by eerie cult classics as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Lee Haven Jones’s The Feast and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men.
Starve Acre is in cinemas from Friday, September 6th
