'40 Acres' plows new ground in action thrills
Danielle Deadwyler is ferocious in Canadian post-apocalyptic drama
If it wasn’t for the locked fences, surveillance cameras and basement full of weapons, the Freeman family farm might seem like a peaceful rural haven. The beautiful landscapes of their rural Canadian homestead are bathed in golden light, as the six members of the family work tirelessly but contentedly to make sure there’s food on the table every night.
But all that safety and security comes at a price. In the opening scene of R.T. Thorne’s thrilling and moving “40 Acres,” a group of armed marauders descend on the farm – and are dispatched by the Freeman family with military precision. The matriarch, Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler) is an ex-military officer, and together with her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) have trained their blended family to respond to threats swiftly and ruthlessly.
And the threats are everywhere. “40 Acres” is set in a post-apocalyptic near-future where famine has left half the world starving, and the other half at each other’s throats. Arable farmland like the Freemans’ is at a premium, and Hailey and Galen have turned the family farm, which has been in Hailey’s family since Reconstruction, into a fortress to protect their four children from desperate bands of thieves – and worse. Thorne and co-writer Glenn Taylor (working from a story by Thorne and Lora Campbell) root the Freemans’ struggle in the larger historical story of America, as a blended family of Black and Indigenous people try to protect what’s theirs, wary of trusting a society that has betrayed them again and again.
The first half of “40 Acres” is an expert bit of world-building – both of the contained world of the Freeman family and the wider world we get glimpses of beyond the fences. Deadwyler (“Till”) delivers a ferocious performance as a mother who will do anything to keep her family safe, but whose emotional state has grown brittle after spending a lifetime on high alert. Greyeyes plays Galen as no less competent or hardened, but still able to find what little joy is left in this world, such as an unexpected trove of spices he finds while hunting for supplies.
Of their four children, the most fully developed is Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor), a teenager who is starting to chafe at his mother’s rigid rules of conduct, beginning to see the farm less like a haven and more like a prison. While on a supply run outside the farm, he spies a beautiful girl, Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) swimming in a river, and becomes smitten. But with raiding parties gathering in strength, and nearby farms falling silent on the shortwave radio, it’s a dangerous time to try and make connections with the outside world.
“40 Acres” is best described as an action-thriller wrapped in a family drama with a touch of horror, especially as the Freemans discover more about what those marauders are up to. (Comparisons to “The Road” are almost inevitable.) The bad guys are a rogue’s gallery of fierce-looking Canadian character actors – there’s one, a soft-spoken older man in glasses played by Patrick Garrow, who absolutely chills your bones in just three or four minutes of screen time.
After building tension during the first two acts, Thorne lets loose with some exciting and cathartic action sequences in the climax, including brutal hand-to-hand combat and a close-quarters gun battle lit only by muzzle flashes.
With such a large cast, not all the performances quite measure up – it’s hard to buy that, in the middle of such a dark time, Emanuel and Dawn could just start up a giggly teen romance. But “40 Acres” is a thought-provoking and thrilling movie, and will satisfy those hungry for something a little different in the post-apocalyptic action genre.
“40 Acres” opens Wednesday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at AMC Fitchburg 18.