DANIELLE DEADWYLER IN 40 ACRES

R.T. THORNE: 40 ACRES (2024)

Post apocalyptic Black drama is more family conflict than promised gore

"Forty acres": the phrase is heavy with pessimism and irony, since it evokes the mostly unkept promise to freed slaves of "forty acres and a mule." It is germane, but the context is very different: a different perspective from many post-apocalyptic stories, focusing on a blended Black and Indigenous family (some Native American language is bandied about) and their struggle for survival. This is a time when famine is widespread, so tilling land is paramount. Hence the great value of "forty acres," if you can get them. But that's just the title. This is an elaborate horror story, really. The situation is one of end days chaos. Marauding cannibals are raiding the area here somewhere in Canada where the Freeman family's farm is. Not much time for a whole lot of farming (we see seed planting though). The Native American note is contributed by Hayley's husband Galin, called Mota by his family (Michael Greyeyes), who has taught the kids Native language and speaks it to them.

This is a little twisted-genre tale rich in local detail and personal warmth from the creditable cast but without a vast picture of events on its horizons. Its post-apocalypse still allows a family to have a whole gun shop arsenal of weaponry and ordnance, electricity, and vehicles running on gasoline. Nothing like Boyle and Garland's 28 Years Later, just seen, where people have been reduced to bows and arrows.

In her Dread Central review, Sharai Bohannan calls this a "family drama with a dash of cannibalism." I'm not sure that really works, but it's true. A memorable part of this is the excellent and now more and more recognized Danielle Deadwyler, playing here family head Hayley Freeman, who lays down the law for other family members, who better reply with an obedient "Yes, Ma'am." She has a military background and this is, essentially, wartime. The best part of 40 Acres is the lived-in relationships between the main characters, which belong in a nicer, more human movie where they might still be sternly presided over by a badass Ms. Deadwyler, but with less lethal stakes.

The first violence is what you remember and this time it's half a dozen very scruffy Cantral Casting rednecks who come in brashly early on and menace the Freemans and get quickly mowed down, led by Hayley. Even the youngest Freeman is expected to kill quickly and efficiently: bullets don't grow on trees, you know, warns Hayley. Knives are more thrifty.

But what is all this? As mentioned, there is no strenuous effort to define a global situation. All we know is there has been a civil war, and friends nearby are getting massacred. Hayley stays in touch with friends fragilely, urgently, by ham radio, till they don't reply. What feels specific is the family relationships and the chaotic, violent state of the immediate surroundings, which still allow moments of calm for young people to dance and flirt, if Hayley doesn't catch 'em at it.

Hayley is most in conflict with her eldest son, Emanuel or Manny (Kataem O’Connor), who wants to go his own way, as he tells us and her several times. He corners a wounded young woman of color in a barn (she gets one of the chapters, entitled "The Girl") and doesn't tell Hayley. Bohannan is not wrong when she complains that this movie "uses cannibalism as a background threat to force the mother and son to talk about their feelings and bring the family closer." The reviewer sees cannibalism as akin to the proverbial gun introduced into a play which must be fired by the final act, except that what she wants is a full-on cannibal feast. There are a few bites, but that won't do. After all, she is writing for Dread Central. Let's have some dread, people!

I'd be happy just with a more unified plotline with some drive running through the movie's nearly two hours, instead of these chapters, which were fine when Tarantino did them in Pulp Fiction, but that was Tarantino. Manny spends a lot of time with "The Girl" and the action loses its umph in the middle as he does so. There is a chapter on "Augusta Taylor," (Canadian actress Elizabeth Saunders) a Southern cracker white woman former Marine who's an old friend of Hayley's: they get trapped together.

The action steps up in the last thirty-five minutes when attackers and marauders start pouring into the "perimeter." This gives you a sense of climax. But this movie remains better in the character development, atmosphere, and acting than in the action and plotting. "The Family," the brief finale, allows the core cast the enjoyment of the fruits of their characters' labors at a cozy dinner table, dodging the pessimsm inherent in the dystopian genre.

A Letterboxd reviewer identified as Alli begins, "Between the constantly tense score, Danielle Deadwyler's fierce performance, and the silence followed by bursts of gunshots, this post-apocalyptic thriller had me almost hitting my son in the face a few times with my flailing arms. That's got to say something." The score is effective, though as can happen it almost drowns out the dialogue sometimes. Do not attend this film with your son, especially not if he is small enough to be endangered by your flailing arms.

40 Acres, 113 mins., premiered at Toronto Sept. 6, 2024. Also seen at Sudbury, REd Sea, SXSW, Night VIsions (Finland), Overlook Festival, New Orleans, and numerous US local fests including SFIFF. Released in US theaters July 2, 2025. Metacritic rating: 74%.