Main cast: Sophia La Porta (Claire), David Edward-Robertson (Bill), Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips (Eleanor), Mark Peachey (Alex), Vicki Hackett (Liz), and Bernard Hill (Thornley)
Director: Chris Cronin

Ever since Hereditary came along and turned family drama and cult activity into a prestige horror flex, filmmakers remembered that folk horror is literally the cheapest genre to make. Find a spooky patch of grass, bring a camcorder, tell the actors not to shave, and if the lighting’s bad, just claim you’re paying homage to The Blair Witch Project. Boom — instant arthouse horror cred.

Enter The Moor, a movie where, like many before it, the true star is not the cast, not the plot, but the giant damp field everyone’s running around in. Honestly, the moor’s agent deserves a raise — this bleak expanse of boggy Yorkshire gloom absolutely devours every frame, while the humans putter around doing increasingly silly human things like pretending to find spiritual energy in moss and getting hysterical over ominous sheep.

The movie kicks off with a solid enough premise: in 1996, young Claire ropes her pal Danny into pulling a classic sweets-heist distraction job. Like any good after-school special gone horribly wrong, Danny promptly vanishes, presumed scooped up by the local serial killer.

Fast forward to the present, because horror movies love to remind us that time heals nothing and trauma ages badly, and Claire’s now a podcaster (of course she is) dealing with guilt and questionable life choices. Bill, Danny’s eternally grieving dad, pops up asking for help to find his boy’s remains before the justice system shrugs and lets the killer walk.

Naturally, the last known burial spot is the moor — because where else? It’s not like serial killers bury bodies in Waitrose car parks.

Up to this point, the film flirts with being a gritty crime drama, and honestly, it might’ve been better if it stayed there. But no, The Moor can’t help itself. Enter not one but two psychics — because apparently, one wasn’t enough to chew the scenery and mutter about ley lines. These people spend a decent chunk of the film staggering around, waving sticks, and having mystical tantrums. It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching your aunt get tipsy and claim she can sense ghosts in your cousin’s IKEA futon.

And here’s where the movie takes a long, soggy detour into Discount Folk Horror Bingo:

• Séance in the middle of nowhere? Check.
• Random animals showing up to glare ominously? Check.
• Hallucinations about dead loved ones? Check.
• Some poor sod screaming at an empty patch of fog? Full house, baby.

The middle third drags like a hungover wedding toast. It feels like someone pitched a tight, atmospheric 30-minute short and a producer went, “Could you stretch it to 110 minutes though? Maybe throw in some sheep and an ancient stone circle?”

By the time the movie meanders to its final act, you’ve mentally composed your grocery list, texted your mom, and googled “Can you get trench foot from watching too many damp British horror movies?”

But here’s the kicker: the ending is actually good. Like really good. One of those rare horror endings that feels properly bleak, thematically neat, and poetically cruel — the kind of ending you’d actually remember if you weren’t so exhausted from the swampy padding that came before it. Just when the film teases you with a sunny wrap-up, it yanks the rug out with a well-earned “Psyche!” moment that circles beautifully back to the film’s opening.

And that’s the tragedy of The Moor. At its bones, it’s got a genuinely decent story about guilt, grief, and the way trauma festers in forgotten places. But it’s buried under so much meandering folk-horror filler and bargain-bin mysticism that you’ll wish someone had edited it down to a tight 30-minute short and saved everyone the extra hour of misty faffing about.

In short: come for the ending, stay for the moor, and try not to strangle the psychics.