Between this film and All You Need Is Death, it’s apparently the year of haunting, horrible music people make with their mouths. In Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre (based on the novel by Andrew Michael Hurley), a small child hears a mysterious whistling. And that’s hardly the creepiest thing to happen in this trailer: candles flare into flame, bloody things grow and pulse, and Matt Smith stands with a hammer. That’s all he’s doing, but the vibes could not be more off.
Smith (House of the Dragon) and Morfydd Clark (The Rings of Power) star as the parents of the aforementioned small boy. The summary of the film says little about their predicament: “In 1970s rural Yorkshire, Richard and Juliette Willoughby’s seemingly idyllic family life is thrown into turmoil when their young son Owen starts acting out of character.” The trailer seems to want to be vague about a plot point that the book’s summary spells out immediately, so I will respect that vagueness—except to say that the Irish Times called the novel “a haunting portrait of what happens in the liminal space between grief and sanity.”
Kokotajlo’s previous film was Apostasy, about a Jehovah’s Witness coming to question her religious beliefs. Starve Acre looks to veer in a more supernatural direction, unless all that weird growth and pulsing is just in someone’s head.
Starve Acre is in theaters July 26th.
