Director: Daniel Kokotajlo
Under the flat grey skies of the Yorkshire moors, a family's quiet routine starts to crack in ways no one in "Starve Acre" can explain.
What is Starve Acre about?
The story settles into the isolated farmhouse life of a married couple whose son begins behaving in ways that unsettle everyone around him, pulling the household toward folklore buried in the land itself rather than any obvious medical or psychological cause. As the father digs into the property's history, looking for answers in old stories tied to the earth beneath the farm, the mother is left to hold the family together while grief and superstition blur into one another. The horror here is patient rather than jump-scare driven, built from long silences, rural isolation, and the sense that something in the soil predates the family entirely. Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark carry the emotional weight as the couple, while director Daniel Kokotajlo, working from Andrew Michael Hurley's source novel, favors restraint over spectacle, letting dread accumulate scene by scene rather than announcing itself outright.
Cast & crew
Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark lead as the couple at the story's center, supported by Erin Richards, Sean Gilder, Robert Emms, Roger Barclay, Matilda Firth, and Rocco Haynes in a cast drawn largely from British film and television.
Context & significance
Produced in the United Kingdom with backing from the United States, the film adapts a novel rooted in English folk horror traditions, favoring atmosphere and rural dread over the more visceral scares typical of mainstream horror releases. Its pacing and muted color palette place it alongside a wave of British folk horror that treats landscape as a character in its own right, using isolated farmland and inherited superstition to generate unease rather than relying on conventional genre shock tactics.
Where & how to watch
"Starve Acre" is available on K-Time with Farsi dubbing and Persian subtitles, viewable through the platform's Farsi interface after signing into a K-Time account.