When you walk into a film expecting it to be good, one of two things usually happens. Sometimes the movie will meet your expectations, and other times it’ll leave you sorely disappointed. But every once in a while, a film ends up being even better than you imagined, and Starve Acre was one of those rare surprises for me. The cast and the plot synopsis made me confident that I would at least like this movie, but when all was said and done, it ended up being one of the most devastatingly effective horror films of the year.

Starve Acre was written and directed by Daniel Kokotajlo, and it stars Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark as Richard and Juliette, a couple who seem to be living an idyllic life in the countryside. But that all changes when their son Owen starts to act out of character. His parents search for a medical explanation for the kid’s odd behavior, but he says it’s because he hears whispers from Jack Grey, a malevolent spirit from local folklore.

Sadly, Owen soon dies from an asthma attack, and as you’d expect, his parents are both devastated. However, sometime after the boy’s tragic passing, Richard and Juliette begin to experience strange, potentially supernatural phenomena, and they eventually start to believe that they’ve tapped into an ancient supernatural force.

Right from the get-go, Starve Acre had me absolutely hooked, and one of the biggest reasons why was the acting. Everybody in this cast is excellent, but unsurprisingly, the best of the bunch are the two leads, Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark. Their performances are completely natural and totally engrossing, so I simply couldn’t take my eyes off them, even when nothing particularly scary was happening.

And when Owen dies, they get even better. For example, Morfydd Clark’s portrayal of grief isn’t loud and ostentatious like, say, Toni Collette’s in Hereditary, but it’s still utterly heartbreaking. You can almost see the grief emanating from everything she says and does, so you can’t help but feel some of her anguish. In contrast, Richard deals with his pain by receding into himself, and Matt Smith makes you believe that he really is so absorbed in his work that the outside world, including his wife, is almost dead to him.

Those two great performances are the heart and soul of Starve Acre, but they’re not the only thing this movie gets right. It also features an amazing mystery, but it’s different from what we typically expect from films like this. Normally, a movie will reveal its secrets in a way that feels like you’re pulling back the layers of an onion, but I’d use a very different metaphor for this one.

At first, the hints we get don’t seem to fit together into a coherent picture, so it’s more like putting unconnected puzzle pieces down on a table. You’ll eventually start to see how it all comes together once enough pieces are there, but until then, you’re just scratching your head wondering what the hell could be happening.

Now, for some viewers, that might be endlessly frustrating, but I found it utterly fascinating. See, I’m a big fan of the unknown in horror, and this mystery allowed me to have my cake and eat it too. It gave me the slow unveiling I love in these films, but it still retained an almost Lovecraftian sense of the unknown. It’s the best of both worlds, and I ate up every second of it.

Last but not least, we have to talk about the horror in Starve Acre. I have to warn you, this movie is a very slow burn, so don’t go into it expecting chills and thrills every few minutes. Sure, there’s a jump scare or two in here, but by and large, the film is more concerned with crafting an eerie atmosphere that will get under your skin and worm its way into your brain.

And on that count, the movie is fantastic. Granted, when it begins, the creepy moments only come every once in a while, but as the story goes on, the atmosphere becomes more pervasive and more effective. There eventually comes a point where that atmosphere saturates every frame of the film, and when we get there, Starve Acre quickly goes beyond anything I’d describe as merely eerie.

It becomes genuinely disturbing, and somewhat surprisingly, the movie reaches that level with a bare minimum of blood and gore. Instead, the story takes a bizarre turn in the final 15 minutes or so, and writer/director Daniel Kokotajlo films these odd events in such a way that he manages to squeeze every ounce of unsettling creepiness out of them.

It’s tough to describe without getting into spoiler territory, but I can say that one of the reasons this third act is so effective is that it’s not entirely clear if the horror is supernatural or psychological. On the surface, it seems like there has to be an evil entity causing all this chaos, but if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll realize that it could just be in our main characters’ heads. There may very well be some unreliable narration going on, and in my opinion, that ambiguity makes Starve Acre even more disturbing.

To be fair, that’s not everybody’s cup of tea, so if you want definitive answers, this isn’t the movie for you. But if you enjoy films that leave you with just as many questions as answers (if not more!), I think you’re going to love Starve Acre. This is just a gem of a movie on every level, so like I said in the intro, it’s one of the most devastatingly effective horror films I’ve seen all year.