Cannibals are coming in the postapocalyptic thriller '40 Acres' — and this family is ready to fight

Los Angeles Times

a day ago

Plymouth Rock landed hard on the forefathers of Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler) and centuries later, she's raising her own children to fight back. R.T. Thorne's postapocalyptic thriller '40 Acres' is set some time in the 21st century with humankind at each other's throats. Fourteen years earlier, a pandemic wiped out the animals and now the crops are in blight too. We don't know what's happening in the rest of the world but here in this rural stretch of Canada, hungry cannibals are hunting people in the woods. Hailey, a ramrod military veteran, refuses to be a redneck's lunch.
'Government ain't done nothing but kill, steal and lock up Black folks before they even fell apart,' Hailey says, brushing off a suggestion that she team up with her neighbors or what's left of the Army. The Freemans — Hailey, her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) and their blended clan of 20-something Manny (Kataem O'Connor), teen daughters Danis and Raine (Jaeda LeBlanc and Leenah Robinson), and young Cookie (Haile Amare) — are isolationists on a fortified farmstead that's belonged to her family since 1852, when an enslaved ancestor escaped from a Georgia plantation and made it across the Canadian border. For protection, they've got an impressive armory, an electric fence and a steadfast suspicion of anyone who shows up.
In the first scene, a band of outsiders trespass on their property and make a big show of being friendly. 'Greetings,' their leader says with a grin. The Freemans don't respond. We just hear a couple whistles and the whoop-whoop-whoop of an ax spinning straight into a stranger's head.
It won't surprise you to learn that Hailey prefers to call her kids 'soldiers' and hectors them to obey her rules from 4:30 a.m. until bedtime. In lieu of traditional schooling — those have long since shuttered — she makes them write essays on 'The Proletarian's Pocketbook,' an inspirational book of quotes with contributions from Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and Karl Marx.
At some point, one of her three daughters will be lying comatose and Hailey will still be barking commands. 'You can't be laid up like this too much longer,' she insists, and it's a credit to Deadwyler that even in this absurdist moment, we see the fear under her armor. Clutching a rifle as she creeps toward danger, Deadwyler looks equal parts intimidating and scared. Yes, she's a badass but her strength is rooted in pain.
This is Thorne's debut feature, and he's so determined to impress that things can feel heavy-handed. He's decorated the Freeman's bunker with faded newspapers screaming about famine and bloodshed — facts they know so well that they surely don't need to use them as wallpaper. His allusions can be as distracting as they are resonant. '40 Acres' is an evocative title but how does it tie into this family's story?
The boundary between historical fact and dramatic symbolism is blurry. Given that the film is set and shot on location in Ontario, we spend too much time wondering how much Americana the Canadian-born Thorne and his co-screenwriter Glenn Taylor want us to layer over it. When we hear talk of Union soldiers in the woods, the reference is more confusing than anything. Did the country create a new army and coincidentally give it the same name?
Yet, Thorne has made a resolute portrait of a woman who can't break free of generational trauma. The same ancestor who founded this homestead left his own family behind in Georgia; that cold resolve is Hailey's inheritance too. At night, she turns on the shortwave radio to eavesdrop on other starving families without being tempted to help.
The family has one outside contact: an on-air acquaintance named Augusta (Elizabeth Saunders), who trades her moonshine for their weed at a nearby depot. A tough biddy herself, she brings out Hailey's deadpan (and unprintable) sense of humor. We're glad the script eventually lets us meet Saunders' Augusta so we can see she's as formidable and endearing as her voice.
But the eldest child, Manny, needs more from the world. The lonely young man steps forward as the heart of the story after he spots a girl his age, Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas), swimming in the nearby river. Strong and battle-hardened with a white scar down his back, he's grown up getting mocked for flubbing a kill shot to the heart. But O'Connor has a lovely gentleness about him, even when, in a morbid touch, cinematographer Jeremy Benning has him spy on the beauty through the crosshairs of his gun scope.
Manny has no idea how to flirt, and he certainly can't bring a date home when his mother's mantra is, 'Shoot first, don't ask questions.' But his hesitant connection with Diaz-Rojas' Dawn is sweet and credible, given the circumstances. She also turns out to be no pushover herself, yet even she sees the Freemans as misanthropic freaks.
Todor Kobakov's gripping score is built of swirling notes and low horns that mix well with the hip-hop needle-drops on Manny's old-school yellow-and-black cassette player. The tension in it prepares us from the get-go that violence is coming. The script is family-centric — honestly, it really only cares about Manny and Hailey — so we never know much about the nameless baddies. (The credits list 13 'drifters' and 20 'cannibals.') But I like how they're written as always trying to come across harmless. You're forever on guard.
The tone of '40 Acres' is so grim that we seize onto its brief moments of warmth, like when Greyeyes' kind and grounded paterfamilias is aghast that his daughters have disinterred a packet of fast-food BBQ sauce. 'Colonial diabetes!' he snorts. Greyeyes also gets the movie's two flashiest fight scenes, one involving a crucifixion, another lit only by muzzle fire.
But if Manny is the film's heart, his brutal mother is its spine. There's not one false beat in Deadwyler's performance, even when she's squashing joy and making us want to strangle her. This future she's battling is figurative, yet her desperate self-reliance — her inability to trust others — is deeply relatable to anyone struggling to get by without a safety net. She's given up on humanity. Still, there has to be a better way to survive.