Thriller 40 Acres follows Hailey Freeman, played by Danielle Deadwyler, and her family, who are descendants of African-American farmers who settled in rural Canada after the U.S. Civil War. She finds herself fighting for not only her ancestral land but her family’s generational survival.Rafy/Mongrel Media
40 Acres
Directed by R.T. Thorne
Written by R.T. Thorne and Glenn Taylor
Starring Danielle Deadwyler, Michael Greyeyes and Kataem O’Connor
Classification N/A; 113 minutes
Opens in theatres July 4
Critic’s Pick
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a fungal plague.
Such is the postapocalyptic landscape introduced by Canadian director R.T. Thorne in his feature debut 40 Acres – a riveting and fiercely political thriller as poignant as a T.S. Eliot poem and as gory as a George A. Romero flick.
Set in the not-too-distant future, where civilization has been knocked back into the agrarian age thanks to a global blight that’s killed off livestock and imploded any sense of government order. But if you happen to have land – and the knowledge to live off of it – you just might be able to survive societal collapse, which has come to include roving packs of cannibals.
Not that any such unwelcome intruders prove to be a problem for the appropriately named Freeman family, who are holding down their fort somewhere in rural Canada with frightening commitment, and a seemingly endless supply of firearms and booby traps. Leading the clan is Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler), who has been tending to her farmstead since 1852, when her enslaved Black ancestors escaped America, her current dystopian reality giving new and bitter meaning to the Union promise of “40 acres and a mule” to any slaves freed during the U.S. Civil War.
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Now fighting for not only her ancestral land but her family’s generational survival, Hailey stands her ground alongside her steely partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) and their blended brood, including the strapping Manny (Kataem O’Connor), his teenage sisters Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc) and Raine (Leenah Robinson), and the young Cookie (Haile Amare), whose age doesn’t preclude her from wielding a weapon with lethal force.
While the Freemans’s day-to-day existence is hardly stable, its shaky foundations are rocked further with the sudden arrival of a young woman named Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas), who in any other reality would be a fine first love for Manny. But in this era of extreme paranoia and isolationism, Manny knows that she represents a threat – and Hailey is not a matriarch to be so easily assuaged, to say nothing of crossed.
Finally making its way to the big screen after years of development – initially, Thorne’s film was set to be produced under the 2018 launch of Telefilm’s micro-budget Talent to Watch program, whose financial limitations would’ve surely kneecapped its scope and impact – 40 Acres feels gigantic in every way.
Director R.T. Thorne’s film is finally being released after years of delay. It was originally set to be produced under the 2018 launch of Telefilm’s micro-budget Talent to Watch program.Rafy/Mongrel Media
Its set pieces are big, bloody affairs – there might be more slayings onscreen here than in the entire history of Canadian cinema (save the Tax Shelter era, which was ripe with cheap slashers). But Thorne and his co-writer Glenn Taylor’s themes are also enormous in their scope and layers, with the story taking aim at everything from the painful legacy of colonization and dispossession to the wounds of generational trauma.
Sometimes, these ideas are filtered onscreen in a more nuanced fashion than others – there is one exceptionally violent scene late in the film involving the Indigenous Galen that drives a nail into the horrific history of Canada’s residential schools system with the overly blunt power of a hundred hammers – but the raw ambition of the filmmakers is on full, and full-throated, display at every gore-soaked turn.
The film’s young actors are uniformly impressive, especially O’Connor and Diaz-Rojas, whose star-crossed lovers feel pulled from more standard-issue YA dystopian thrillers. And veteran Canadian actor Greyeyes delivers a welcome dose of charm as Galen, the somewhat more easygoing of the Freeman parents.
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But this is really Deadwyler’s show, and the American actor (Till, Carry-On) is so commanding and fierce as Hailey that I was genuinely concerned about the performer’s resting heart rate. Thorne, an agile commander of talents big and small thanks to his work in both music videos (Drake, Snoop Dogg) and Canadian television (CBC’s The Porter), keeps Deadwyler just on the edge of madness for the film’s entire run, and the emotional payoff is tremendous.
Like the film’s most obvious antecedent, Jeff Barnaby’s 2019 Canadian zombie thriller Blood Quantum (also starring Greyeyes), 40 Acres is a top-tier genre film that Trojan-horses a flood of knotty, provocative conversations into multiplexes via the best kind of speculative fiction. Thorne has planted the seed – now it’s up to this country’s film industry to ensure that he’s able to harvest his visions for years to come.
