It’s commonplace for creatives to navigate apocalyptic tales. These types of stories draw upon fundamental narratives that border on the cliché and yet engage in profound aspects of our fear of everything we care about being stripped away. These stories serve as the outward manifestation of our species’ unique self-knowledge of their eventual doom, partly as a poetic grappling with existential trauma, and partly as a way of making one take stock of what they have before it disappears. Plus, it allows you to have movies where people slice throats with machetes and blast their brains over cornfields, all while certain these barbaric actions of the protagonists are the morally correct thing to do.

It’s the seeds of these disparate elements, some drawing upon emotional empathy, others leaning towards cathartic outbursts of violence, that allow films like RT Thorne’s 40 Acres to fully germinate and grow. Superficially, it’s akin to many other films in this field, an admixture of family drama, survivalist guilt, the complexities of isolationism, and even a bit of cannibalism.

What Is ’40 Acres’ About?
Image Via Mongrel Media

Should we blame the COVID lockdown for a sudden blossoming of films set in such isolation, or the realities of independent filmmaking that benefit from relatively confined locations and the laser-like focus that constraining scope can provide to a film’s benefit? As with Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End, which itself mixes deeper ruminations within a different genre type in the musical, Thorne takes on more than a bit from the Romero-ian horror genre, and while there aren’t zombies running around per se, it would not be completely absurd to somehow find a few tucked in the grimy corners just to make things a bit more macabre.

That’s not to say 40 Acres is a film of cheap thrills simply there for the sake of entertainment. Beyond the more morbid aspects, there’s an uncommonly effective ferocity in the performances, particularly due to an astonishing lead take by Danielle Deadwyler. The title of the film evokes the promise made at the end of the American Civil War, the same broken commitment that gives Spike Lee’s production company its “40 acres and a mule” moniker. In Thorne’s tale, the world is ravaged by a food shortage, with a plague decimating the animal population, leaving those able to cultivate among the most protected, as well as the most hunted, given these new circumstances.

Radios connect the various homesteads that still produce, with bartering at neutral areas (moonshine for marijuana) one of the few ways that connections with outside society are maintained. Otherwise, those on the farm are made to look inward, with everyone on the outside by definition not only a threat but one that must be actively eliminated.

A Deadly Danielle Deadwyler Leads a Powerful Cast
Image via Netflix

Danielle Deadwyler plays Hailey Freeman, a former U.S. Army soldier who returns to Canada to reconnect with her son, Emanuel, whom she’s left with relatives while off fighting battles that resulted from the global food shortages. Flashbacks to the return to the farm that serves as her family’s legacy are interspersed with scenes where the now young adult Emanuel Kataem O’Connor) is beginning to chafe at her strict rules and discipline.

Hailey’s partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) has a keen knowledge of agriculture and a biting tongue, his sardonic humor developed out of his own generational trauma, bringing the uniquely sardonic tone from his Indigenous roots to the family dynamic. Mixing English and Cree messaging, Galen and the rest of the children form a kind of family platoon, balancing the making of vegetarian means augmented with carefully secured spices with full-on military-like engagements with incoming hordes. Thus 40 Acres manages to plow lots of land here, shifting effortlessly from the intimate and universalist to the broader, more epic elements that manifest as acts of bravery and violence. It’s a complex mix that works astonishingly well given how unnatural some of the narrative collisions appear at first glance.

R.T. Thorne Brings Us Into a Peculiar Apocalyptic World
Image Via Red Sea Film Festival

Like other genre films, we’re asked to simply accept a lot of what’s taking place on faith. Just as one needn’t spend too much time wondering why a character bursts into song in a musical, to be thinking strictly logistically about life under such apocalyptic conditions surely is contrary to taking things in on their own terms. I briefly wondered just who might be keeping the electricity going in a world under such turmoil. Then I thought warmly of David Cronenberg and Tracy Wright in Don McKeller’s Last Night (itself not only a Canadian classic, but one of the most perfect apocalyptic-themed films ever made), who fought to keep the lights on for all still around and let the rest of all that stuff slide.

This is helped because Thorne’s world-building is effective but never the central point. The farm buildings are weathered yet feel lived in rather than ravaged to suit the overly ambitious needs of a production designer. The tech is simple and effective, never leaning too far away from what would conceivably be at hand under such dire circumstances. There’s a believability here while never needing to overly explain, the setting suitably fading to the background allowing character to be the prime motivation for all that transpires.

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That’s not to say everything is so subtle or oblique. While Thorne names his characters with the last name “Freemen,” alluding coincidentally or not to yet another Canadian director’s film from this year involving battles on a slightly more galactic scale, the entire history of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as the near obliteration of the Indigenous population, is clearly top of mind. Yet rather than mere polemic, there’s a kind of elegance in stripping things down to the core, just as in this case society has been shed of so much of its trappings.

It would be easy to simply dismiss these elements that evoke the stains of the past while missing the point that no matter how fictional this particular apocalypse appears there’s an undercurrent throughout of actual, historical abominations that fuel this family’s strive for survival. It all helps explain both the fierce loyalty and reluctance on the outside, the behaviors of the matriarch not simply made out of her desire to be insular, but honed from very real lessons about how the very things that she holds dear, land and family, are what her ancestors and her partner’s were so violently denied.

‘40 Acres’ Mixes Visceral Thrills With Deeper Traumas
Be it in the form of a slave ship, a plantation, or a residential school, conventional society has for centuries been at the fore of ripping apart families, erasing culture, and preventing the inter-generational transfer of wealth and knowledge. The fact that this is all crammed into a film that’s also a revenge fantasy, complete with home invasion, ninja-like attacks in the dark, and full-on gun battles, makes for quite the film.

Thus, 40 Acres is at once an exhilarating blast of action tropes, with a well-earned edge that leans into far deeper, and. frankly, far darker aspects of our past. There are moments of excess that are perhaps unnecessary, and other elements that never quite coalesce, but as a debut, the film is astonishing, and the performances throughout are effective and engaging. The future of this world may be bleak, but the very fact that some survived all that came before proves the impact of that most delicate of things: hope.

It’s this hope that is given a chance to be nurtured and cultivated from these tended fields that gives the film its power beyond the chaos and confrontations. And it’s this spirit that engenders Thorne’s film with a complexity that goes beyond the spectacle, while never allowing these aspects to descend into being didactic or superfluous. This is a complete vision from a newly minted feature director, and it’s a work very much welcome as it joins the many that have tilled similar acreages.

40 Acres screened at this year’s Red Sea International Film Festival.

R.T. Thorne’s debut is an astonishing look at family trauma and survivalist guilt while still being an entertaining apocalyptic thriller.ProsThrillingly told apocalyptic taleDanielle Deadwyler’s performance anchors a terrific ensembleDeeper, darker truths evoked through traditional genre tropes ConsOccasionally loses its momentum

40 Acres depicts Hailey Freeman and her family, the last descendants of African American farmers in rural Canada post-1875. Set in a famine-stricken future, they strive to defend their ancestral home against forces seeking to usurp it.Release Date September 6, 2024 Director R.T. Thorne Cast Danielle Deadwyler , Kataem O’Connor , Michael Greyeyes , Milcania Diaz-Rojas , Leenah Robinson , Jaeda LeBlanc , Elizabeth Saunders , Ava Weiss , David MacInnis , Julian Lewis , David Chinchilla , Patrick Kerton , Tyson Kirk Runtime 108 Minutes Writers R.T. Thorne Expand