The Moor review – Yorkshire-set missing-kids chiller is

Director Chris Cronin masterfully maintains a needling ambiguity about the source of evil in this haunting tale of a father searching for his long-missing son

Looking for a group of long-missing children on a patch of moorland, podcaster Claire (Sophia La Porta) thinks she has defined her search area. But when she lays down her map in front of the police chief who once led the case, he reaches for a box and arrays five more Ordnance Surveys around it. His rejoinder – “That’s the moor” – is the equivalent of “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” in this redoubtable folk horror debut evidently inspired by the Brady-Hindley murders. You could also call it topographical horror, with director Chris Cronin using a simple set of elements – swirling mists, neolithic stones, baleful staring rams, chairs that look like baleful staring rams – to construct a formidable ambience on his fictional Holme moor.

Claire is beholden to this search because of a guilty secret: in 1996, she was indirectly responsible for the disappearance of one of the kids, called Danny, by persuading him to act as a decoy while she pilfered sweets from a newsagent. Now she is riding shotgun, or bodycam in fact, to Danny’s harrowed father Bill (David Edward-Robertson), who is still desperately combing the peat bogs for his son’s remains. His obsession is further stoked when they find a single abandoned shoe in a blackened gully. But Claire questions his sanity when she realises Bill is pinpointing locations with the help of pendulum dowser Alex (Mark Peachey) and his psychic daughter Eleanor (Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips).