Watch enough genre movies and you will realise that grief is inevitably a doorway to all kinds of darkness. Daniel Kokotajlo’s creepily atmospheric adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel is the latest in a long list of films (including The Babadook and Don’t Look Now) that harness bereavement in the service of horror.

Juliette (Morfydd Clark) and her archaeologist husband, Richard (Matt Smith), have returned to his family home in 1970s Yorkshire. But then a tragedy leaves the couple vulnerable to an ancient evil that lurks in the land. A slow-burning folk-horror, the film is a marked change of direction for Kokotajlo, whose debut, Apostasy, dealt with a crisis of faith in a Jehovah’s Witness community.

Starve Acre is steeped in arcane rituals and underpinned by the layers of pagan mythology that lurk beneath our thin veneer of civilisation. The brooding atmosphere is as oppressive as the haunted-looking wallpaper in the couple’s farmhouse. 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.

• In UK and Irish cinemas