Had the plot divulged more of the background, this folk horror could have been both freaky and memorable. What we get instead is a meandering tale of a family coming apart where the narrative only realizes what it wants to do right at the end.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 12, 2025

Starve Acre doesn’t surprise us, or ever truly defy the tropes of the Evil Twigs genre, but it’s a well-made and -acted venture dishing up a few earthy chills.

| Mar 10, 2025

“Starve Acre” is exquisitely atmospheric, offering a fever-dream rendering of the power of anguish to fracture us and to dissolve our connection to reality.

| Oct 28, 2024

There’s lots to admire in the crafting of this modern British folk horror and fans of the genre may adore the many references but there’s something amiss in the emotional stakes.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 7, 2024

If you happen to be on the film's slow, moody, cryptic folk-horror vibe, Starve Acre is a delectable, rotting feast.

| Oct 1, 2024

Smith and Clark’s performances centre a mysterious portrait of grief with a freakish payoff.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 20, 2024

Starve Acre satisfies well enough for those with an appreciation for atmosphere but falls short of reaching the heights of 2024’s more prominent horrors.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 15, 2024

Although Kokotajlo doesn’t feel entirely at home in the horror genre, he is clearly a talent to be reckoned with. Perhaps he’s at his best when working -- as he did with Apostasy -- with more personal material.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 11, 2024

Don’t go expecting the jack-in-the-box scares of full-tilt horror, but the disquieting slow burn of excavating the darker corners of your own kith and kin, and you’ll find skeletons and hauntings enough.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 11, 2024

Played with nuance by a terrific cast, the film grows increasingly insinuating and unnerving. Writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo skilfully cranks up the unsettling vibes using elemental flourishes and shockingly nasty plot points.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 10, 2024

Some pleasingly icky special effects add to the general sense of mouldering menace. Where the picture stumbles, however, is in its almost total lack of effective scares.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 10, 2024

Starve Acre, based on a novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, shuns shock scares, instead finding sinisterness in its lonely setting.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 9, 2024

Definitively worth checking out.

| Sep 9, 2024

It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 7, 2024

The story unfolds patiently,perhaps to a fault,but director Daniel Kokotajlo displays a strong command of atmosphere, using unnerving imagery and Matthew Herbert's moody score to craft an eerie and sometimes upsetting tone.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2024

The terrain between pagan folklore and psychodrama is turned over here by hand fork: it’s delicately developed as metaphor, but lacks the crazed tilt into shock it needs for major impact.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2024

But it’s tasteful to a fault, with Kokotaljo never quite finding ways to deliver the sort freakiness that might help its more outré elements – especially his provocative final image – land without seeming comical. 

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 6, 2024

Daniel Kokotajlo’s film looks and sounds grimly entrancing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 6, 2024

But the animatronic hare is lethal in all the wrong ways, being possibly the worst horror film effect since the talking goat in Drag Me to Hell... Be afraid? Unfortunately, no.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 6, 2024

Although less distinctive than APOSTASY, STARVE ACRE’s distinctive qualities have roots in Kokotajlo’s eye for unsettling images that build dread and a balance of effects work and plot developments that toes the line adeptly between unnerving and absurd.

| Sep 5, 2024