Post-Apocalyptic Thriller 40 Acres Has Skillful Set-Up, Then Fences Itself In
40 Acres fires off like a tense siege thriller, with text explaining how an animal-killing pandemic led to civil war which led to famine, before following some grizzled militia-looking types approaching a farmhouse. But these guys are dispatched quickly and efficiently; it’s a matter of minutes before kids are standing over the bodies, discussing their defense strategies just as casually as if they’d caught a fox raiding a henhouse. “You always miss the heart,” one of them chides another for an insufficiently fatal stabbing, while Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler) issues a scolding for wasting bullets on someone who could be killed with knives. It quickly becomes clear that defending the land from interlopers is more routine farm chore than harrowing ongoing battle. The family’s home is self-sustaining and fortified, at least for now.
R.T. Thorne, the director and co-writer behind 40 Acres, has a gift for communicating this kind of information without calling attention to it, weaving in exposition naturally and off-handedly. Yes, there’s that opening card setting the scene, but it functions as unobtrusively as an “at rise” description at the top of a written play. We figure that Hailey must have some form of military discipline, whether trained or self-taught, before that’s confirmed, and eventually gather that she leads a blended family with Galen (Michael Greyeyes), an older Indigenous man. There’s some talk of an outside “Union,” seemingly referring to the civil war – though the film takes place in Canada, not the United States, and the Union is mentioned primarily in the context of people posing as members in order to better ravage local survivors.
Hailey has a radio to monitor potential dangers in the area, but she resists the idea of connecting her family to anyone else’s; it might make it all the harder to kill intruders on sight if any ambiguity about motives are introduced into their regimen (which is so tightly managed you might wonder if the family caught a showing of A Quiet Place before society crumbled). Of course, a strict regimen naturally chafes against the stirrings of a teenage son Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor), who sees a semi-stranger we later learn is called Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) swimming in a nearby river. Resentment that his family is all he knows, and that his mother often treats him as a misbehaving recruit rather than her child, starts to bubble up.