![]() These could function equally as waking-dream metaphors for grief and trauma, those two pillars of contemporary horror, or more intriguingly, as gnarly new realities for a shattered family rebuilding itself around a different natural order. It’s for the audience - likely latching onto the viewpoint of Juliette’s visiting, comparatively sensible sister Harrie (Erin Richards) - to decide how literally to take the film’s plunges into the supernatural. As they do, uncanny new signs of life emerge around Starve Acre, beginning with the yellowing hare skeleton that Richard discovers on the premises - and which, via some marvelously icky effects work, stubbornly resists its ashes-to-ashes fate.Īs all life begins to tilt out of whack, Kokotajlo permits his hitherto stark narrative to sprout and twist and fester into chaos. And when a worse fate befalls Owen, Richard and Juliette retreat into themselves - and into the occult - in separate ways. ![]() When Owen, not party to any of this, claims to hear whisperings from one Jack Grey, Richard should perhaps be more worried instead, his suspicions run to longtime neighboring farmer Gordon (Sean Gilder, deftly veering between bluff and aggressive), another local keeper of folklore. Haunted by his late father’s unusually abusive behavior, he pores over the dead man’s effects, revisiting and perhaps inheriting Dad’s obsession with sinister local mythology regarding their own land - including stories of a demonic sprite called Jack Grey, and an ancient, vanished oak tree of transformative pagan significance. What Richard hasn’t told Juliette is that his own memories of the place aren’t happy at all. Lank-haired archaeology lecturer Richard (Smith) grew up in the area, and has recently returned to his childhood home - the inauspiciously named Starve Acre - with his wife Juliette (Clark), with the supposed intention of giving their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw) a freer, more idyllic upbringing. The film is thus set in the precise era when many of its most obvious influences, including “The Wicker Man” and “Don’t Look Now,” would have been on cinema screens - not that anybody’s going to the movies in this remote, wind-whipped enclave, where even television seems a slightly anachronistic imposition on the local lifestyle, fitting only when the faulty local signal collapses the image into blaring static. The particular tea-stained finish of Adam Scarth’s cinematography - drenching the film in a kind of year-round fall fug - is our first clue that “Starve Acre” is set in a 1970s Britain of drab economic severity and parochial tightness, even before costume designer Emma Fryer’s knobbly knits and Francesca Massariol’s tan, timber-tastic production design underline the point. It’s freaky and frightening enough to draw distributor interest, aided by fine, all-in performances from its name leads, though it firmly occupies an equivalent art-horror niche to Clark’s 2019 vehicle “Saint Maud.” (You could say both films are fascinated by matters of obsessive, cultish belief.) As it turns out, he’s equally adept with genre whimsy of a punishingly dark stripe - hewing closely to the very literate English gothic of Andrew Michael Hurley’s well-regarded 2019 source novel - while still wielding the sparse filmmaking rigor of his first film. The prices are solid as well, and they will.Premiering in the main competition at this year’s London Film Festival, “Starve Acre” marks a somewhat unexpected pivot for writer-director Kokotajlo from his superb 2017 debut “Apostasy,” a tough-minded study of religious conflict in a modern Jehovah’s Witness family that traded in unsparing realism. The owners are super chill and know their stuff, and they have a superb selection of games and systems, both new and old school. Got told having a game put on reserve was against company policy.the next customer asked for something on the shelf and they told them it was being reserved for someone, cool place, but only. I wasn't disappointed to find a great selection of. I don't see many of these anymore, and I was really excited to check them out. What a charming little locally-owned video game store in OKC. OKC has been in need of a business like this and. Super friendly, personable, and knowledgeable owners! We enjoyed visiting with them, checking out the merchandise, and of course making a purchase. You know a video game store is legit when you walk in and immediately see 4 adults sitting and playing some of sort of card game, a sight you don't often see, and I am all in for it.
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