The Moor is a British Horror/Mystery/Drama film, directed by Chris Conin, and the cast includes Sophia La Porta, David Edward-Robertson, Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips, Vicki Hackett and Bernard Hill
My Thoughts On The Moor
It’s Yorkshire, 1996. Two kids, Claire and Danny, sneak into a corner shop to steal sweets. It’s innocent enough, until it isn’t. Claire steps outside. Danny stays behind, and within seconds, he’s gone.
And just like that, a boy vanishes from the world, and a chain of trauma, grief, and obsession begins to unspiral.
Twenty-five years later, Danny’s father, Bill (David Edward-Robertson), is still searching, and still convinced his son is buried somewhere out on the moor, along with some other children who went missing during the same period.
Claire (Sophia La Porta), now an adult, has tried to move on, and she runs a podcast focused on true crime and local legends. She’s built a life that skirts around her childhood trauma rather than confronting it.
But when Bill asks her to return to the moor, to help him document his findings, she hesitates. Then, reluctantly, she agrees, and what follows is a bit of a descent.
Director Chris Cronin crafts The Moor with remarkable restraint. The story isn’t overloaded with exposition or complicated twists, but instead, it moves slowly and deliberately, giving its characters actual space to unravel in real time.
For much of the runtime, the horror remains in the background, unspoken, unseen, and that’s exactly what makes it quite effective. This is a film built on atmosphere and emotional weight, not jump scares.
And that atmosphere is rooted in the land itself.
The moor itself is a presence. Vast, empty, and haunting, it feels like it holds secrets just beneath its surface. The camera lingers on the landscape, inviting us to sit in the silence, to feel the weight of it.
It’s not just about getting lost in the moor, it’s about losing your grip on what’s real.
It’s not just about getting lost in the moor, it’s about losing your grip on what’s real.
The film plays with perspective in fairly clever and unsettling ways. Traditional cinematic shots are blended with documentary-style footage, interviews, body cam clips, podcast recordings, and this patchwork of perspectives grounds everything in realism but also destabilizes you.
At times, it feels like you’re watching a true crime doc, while at others, a horror film. The shift is subtle, but by the final act, we’re fully in the realm of the supernatural, and it lands with unexpected force.
The Moor is a film that is less interested in explaining its horrors than in exploring what they represent, and the idea and thoughts of possession runs throughout the film in multiple forms. Bill is possessed. not by spirits, but by his loss, and by the need to find his son, his grief becomes something external, something alive.
It consumes him. It’s not a metaphor, it is the haunting. But Cronin contrasts this with a more literal form of possession, one of the characters becomes a vessel for something undeniably otherworldly. And the film leaves us to wonder, which is more dangerous?
The moor itself becomes an extension of that question. Can a place be possessed? Can land hold emotion, memory, even intent? It leaves you to ponder these questions.
It’s a question that lingers, and as the story unfolds, we begin to sense that the land does want something, and that children are somehow at the center of it.
What makes this all so effective is that Cronin never rushes to the horror elements. Instead, he lets it unfold naturally, even quietly. When the supernatural finally does arrive, it feels earned, and the final 3rd shifts into full horror.
It all taps into fear that’s rooted in loss, in memory, in places that remember more than they should.
The Moor is a story about obsession, grief, and the invisible scars left by trauma. It’s about how some people can't let go, and how sometimes, the world won’t let them. It's folk horror in the truest sense - tied to place, to history, to myth, and to things we don’t fully understand.
This isn’t a film that wants to scare you with cheap thrills, it wants to haunt you, and it’s a quiet, measured descent into horror that takes its time..
It won't be for everybody, but for people who appreciate the slow descent horror vibe and pacing, it's worth a stream.