The Moor (2024) – Thick in atmosphere, thin on character (Review)

The Moor is the debut feature-film from Chris Cronin, and it stays true to the UK’s rich history of regional folk horror while making damn sure to get the most out of the locality it’s named after – specifically Yorkshire. Horror has a long history rooted in the area, from the town of Whitby featuring in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the county’s appearance in the likes of Threads and An American Werewolf in London, to Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre (starring Matt Smith and Morfyyd Clarke), releasing later this year. Now, an actual Yorkshireman is the latest to take inspiration from the region’s beautiful but sinister landscape.

The film opens on the streets of a Yorkshire town in 1996 as two dastardly children, Claire and Danny, try their luck on a heist for a couple of Dip-Dabs from a corner shop – a plan that quickly turns sour when Danny disappears without a trace, never to be seen by Claire again. Jump forward twenty five years and Danny’s kidnapping and murder is now the stuff of local folklore, and anyone associated with the case becomes the subject of regular predatory harassment from the press. Now a true crime podcaster, Claire is enlisted by Danny’s father, Bill, to go back to the moor where he suspects Danny’s body was dumped before the killer is released from prison after serving a life-sentence.

The moor that the film is named after is fully utilised as the main attraction of this slow-burner – a desert of fog and marshland populated only by some unnerving-looking sheep (descendants of Black Philip, I can only assume). It’s established as a gargantuan stretch of uninhabited land in an effective scene with the late Bernard Hill – a region that the documentary crew has to tirelessly trek through before night catches up to them. The atmosphere and eerie sense of other-worldliness comes effortlessly in these sequences, with the grey oppressive landscapes completely lending themselves to a feeling of unease, while the indistinguishable peat bogs represent both a risk to the gang, as well as a reminder of the secrets that the land holds (these bogs can infamously prevent bodies from decomposing). Shot in the relatively rare 2:1 aspect ratio that was used in Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Sam Cronin’s cinematography shines here, and both films share a bold commitment to primarily daytime horror.

The Moor takes a turn to the supernatural when Bill, rather desperately, hires the help of two diviners to help locate Danny’s body (it’s a big year for the diviner community with both this and La Chimera). The implication that our protagonists are somehow tethered to the realm of the spiritual leads to some brilliantly conceptualised scares, like a possession/seance sequence that manages to put The Exorcist: Believer to shame – despite The Moor’s far lower production value. The GoPro action camera that Claire uses for her documentaries is also brilliantly utilised for some genuinely unsettling, first-person analogue horror scenes.

Unfortunately that original approach to horror isn’t as smartly conceived throughout the relatively bloated 120-minute runtime of The Moor, with scenes away from the countryside trying to sustain that feeling of unease – but through far cheaper tactics. The sound design and rumbly score are used entirely as a crutch for a large chunk of the film’s scares: someone calls Claire’s name – DUN!; a character merely enters the frame – DUN!!; in one of the most egregious examples, a windscreen wiper wipes across the screen – DUN!!! This jolting of audio to moments that otherwise aren’t scary in the slightest draws a line between how confidently engaging the scenes in the moor are in comparison to the weakness of scenes away from the countryside. There’s an effort to make a consistent level of unsettling intensity throughout the film, but it just doesn’t translate to the interior moments away from the moor, and Cronin seems to be trying too hard to make these parts atmospheric.

Any sense of history or moodiness is absent in the more character-driven scenes at Bill’s house, and it’s hard to stay engaged with the one-dimensionality of the cast over the runtime – especially when their entire dynamic with each other shows little to no strain, despite the emotionally weighty stakes. The story itself does little to support the film as the narrative fails to pick up on plot ideas that are hinted at throughout. For example, the media is constantly referenced as a faceless, monolithic evil that we never actually see, while Claire’s purpose in the story as someone making a true crime documentary is never interrogated (there’s also the weird confusion of her being a podcaster – even though she goes around filming and editing videos of her investigations). This simplistic take on “the media” feels like a missed opportunity to question the ethics around the oftentimes exploitative and flippant nature of the internet’s true crime community. It could also have been a chance for Claire to rely on the camera for a sense of control (similar to The Blair Witch Project), or to maybe even use it to to tame her trauma by recording it.

In another miss, the killer himself (a sure-fire source of tension and fear for the story), is almost completely absent or confusingly utilised as the unquestioned culprit for Danny’s murder. It’s unclear if the discovery of Danny’s body would somehow keep this person behind bars, and there’s a big deal made out of the fact that his identity has never been revealed to the public – a point that goes absolutely nowhere. An eventual development involving the killer is introduced far too late to make any meaningful difference to our protagonists, and it’s this muddled sense of drama and characters that makes the meaty runtime feel harder to justify. The end result is a half-baked tale of how a murder can drive the people affected by it to desperate, sometimes unreasonable places to make sense of it all and find closure. I was left wishing for a version of this where the crew gets lost on the moor so there’s less dialogue that perfunctorily backs itself into a corner, and more of the pure chiller vibes that make this film thrive in its strongest moments.

Jake’s Archive – The Moor (2023)