The dystopian imagination gets replenished so often nowadays that it can be hard sometimes to distinguish one screen apocalypse from another. At the start of R.T. Thorne’s 40 Acres, for example, we’re told that a fungal pandemic killed almost all animal life 14 years ago. That then led to a civil war, which led to a famine, and now we’re in a world where “the most valuable resource is farmland.” This sounds specific enough, but the film’s bleakness belongs on a continuum with any number of works from the past ten or 15 or 20 years. You half expect Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee from The Road to stroll through the frame, or for our protagonists to run into Ralph Fiennes from 28 Years Later somewhere along the way. Who knows, maybe Furiosa will show up, too. Or those war correspondents from Civil War. All these postapocalyptic stories are different — and some are better and more exciting than others — yet the numbness that settles in their wake can feel commonplace, familiar.
40 Acres is a Canadian film that tries to find its own distinctive way of approaching the doomsday scenario, though many of its moves are fairly routine. With farmland so precious and marauders wandering about, former soldier Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler) and her First Nations husband, Galen (Michael Greyeyes), run a tight ship with their family, which includes Hailey’s adult son, Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor). All the kids know how to fight and handle guns. They’re told to read The Proletarian’s Pocketbook (a real chapbook containing inspirational quotes from such revolutionary luminaries as Karl Marx and Malcolm X) and to immediately suspect any strangers. There’s a long history here, as the film’s title suggests. Hailey’s ancestors settled this land in Canada after fleeing Georgia following the first Civil War. The revolutionary posters and books strewn about their home aren’t just fashionable resistance material; they partly speak to this family’s understandable refusal to put their trust in institutions or others. This serves them well in their current predicament: The opening sequence shows the family blowing away a group of clearly ill-intentioned men (and one woman) who try to approach the farm. There are, we’re told, packs of cannibals lurking in the quiet countryside.
Despite the genre overtones, this isn’t really an action movie, or even much of a thriller. Most of the film centers on Hailey’s tough love and her refusal to let in the outside world, both literally and spiritually. She regularly chats over CB radio with a nearby farmer (Elizabeth Saunders) who’s taken in some stray kids, but Hailey isn’t having any of that; she tends strictly to her own. — which causes tension with the increasingly curious Emanuel, who wants to explore the area and meet people, and one day chances upon a gorgeous young woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) swimming in a nearby river. Again, a familiar setup; the overprotective postapocalyptic parent is virtually its own subgenre nowadays.
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While Deadwyler has repeatedly proven her enormous talent in other films, she’s given such a severe character here that her performance comes off as frustratingly one-note. Greyeyes’s playful, salt-of-the-earth demeanor tempers Hailey’s hard-headedness. Galen is a man whose face lights up at the discovery of a forgotten cache of spices (“People kill for this stuff,” he yelps, holding up a jar of saffron — words that will of course prove prophetic) and who flies into a hilarious rage when his kids unearth some unopened fast-food barbecue-sauce packets. It’s an intriguing contrast, and one wishes the film gave us more interactions between Galen and Hailey, a bit more of the life of this family beyond its relentless rituals and its stern-faced preparations for the inevitable.
Director R.T. Thorne has an eye for evocative compositions, moves his camera well, and can stage an efficient kill — all skills that will likely serve him well in future endeavors. But ultimately, 40 Acres teases a more jagged and interesting movie than it delivers. The question of race in a postapocalyptic setting is certainly a provocative one, but the film mostly just pays it lip service, opting instead for generic set pieces and a couple of awkward speeches. (It also doesn’t really explore the fundamental disconnect between this family’s supposed activism — all those posters of Fred Hampton, those resistance books, all that talk about the proletariat and the evils of capitalism — and its insularity.) More important, the characters never quite come to life and neither does the movie, stuck as it is between Hailey’s hard eyes and some pro forma action-y standoffs. Technique is great and all, but any story about parents and children, especially in such extreme circumstances, should be bursting with emotional resonance and humanity. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s just another apocalypse.
