40 Acres

The story begins with an intricately choreographed set piece in which the family coolly puts down a band of those marauders who have somehow made it inside the perimeter fence. Afterwards, we are introduced to the Freemans (a name perhaps a bit on the nose): Matriarch and ex-soldier Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler channeling Danai Gurira’s Michonne from The Walking Dead), who rules the family with a necessarily iron hand; her teenaged son, Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor), beginning to chafe at her rule; tough as nails Galen (Michael Greyeyes), a First Nations man who unquestioningly backs up Hailey and helps to enforce her rule; his daughter, Raine (Leenah Robinson), handy with a sniper rifle, and Emanuel’s younger sister, Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc), just old enough to begin going out scavenging on supply runs with Galen and Emanuel. The family and the farm are threatened when Emanuel rescues a young woman from a neighboring farm after it is overrun by marauders and Hailey, uncharacteristically, fails to shoot her on sight after discovering her.

40 ACRES is one of the most accomplished films I have seen this season. Director Thorne’s spare script contains not a single unnecessary word or action. The film is shot in a gorgeous autumnal palette of browns, greens, and golds, lush but not garish. Thorne, in his feature debut, directs with a masterful hand. His action scenes snap, and, in the downtime between them, his explorations of familial relationships and dynamics ring true. He stages a jaw-dropping gunfight in total darkness lit only by random bursts of muzzle flashes.

Dystopian films are, by definition, violent. The Freemans and everyone in their world are unremittingly merciless, as they must be to survive. To viewers who might be put off by that, I would say the violence is not gratuitous, it’s not particularly bloody, and it makes up a relatively small part of the movie, in which the focus is almost more family drama than it is an action film. Given who it was made by and who it’s about, it also addresses, peripherally, race and justice and freedom, which informs it with more weight than your average action flick. It also makes a sly observation, that it might take an actual plague, or some uprising equally as violent, to overthrow oppression and place power, finally, in the hands of those to whom it has been routinely and systemically denied. That’s a message privileged people might want to contemplate. 4.5 cats“