It is interesting to chart our vision of what the post-apocalypse might be. The shortage is never the same, but the outcome always is: we run out of something, people get desperate, and then the rest of the movie happens.
R.T. Thorne’s 40 Acres follows this formula, with the shortage being food. The film takes place sometime in the near future, 14 years after all the animals in the world died and some 10 years after the resulting civil war fought over the remains of the resources.
Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler) is an ex-soldier and the descendant of freed Black slaves who migrated to rural Canada after the American Civil War. She has a 40-acre property in a world where farmland is among the most precious of assets. She and her family grow crops, scavenge for supplies, and ruthlessly defend their property against the occasional bands of raiders who decide to target them.
The setup is excellent, and the film wastes no time setting up how well-off the Freemans are. In the very first scene, they defend against an attack, with daughter Raine (Leenah Robinson), an expert sniper, finding the pink mist from an attic window, as her son Manny (Kataem O’Connor) and partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) hunt interlopers in a cornfield. Their other daughters, Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc) and Cookie (Haile Amare), also get in on the action, with the latter eventually being scolded not for being too young to join the fray and killing a man, but for wasting bullets to do it.
The rest of the film proceeds as expected: the Freemans maintain radio contact with a network of nearby farms, which start to go silent one by one. At the same time, a mysterious young woman named Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) shows up and captures Manny’s eye because they’re both young and attractive, and he’s never seen anyone his own age who wasn’t his sister before. Eventually, he goes out into the wilderness at her behest and attracts a group of men who are interested in an alternate food source.
Link: https://exclaim.ca/film/article/viff-2024-40-acres-film-review
VIFF 2024: ’40 Acres’ Is a Tried-and-True Post-Apocalypse Story | Exclaim!
