Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: RT Thorne
Starring: Danielle Deadwyler, Kataem O'Connor, Michael Greyeyes, Jaeda LeBlanc, Milcania Diaz-Rojas, Leenah Robinson
While it continues to prove popular (albeit sadly not enough for Furiosa to draw in sufficient crowds), the post-apocalypse sub-genre has been so overplayed in recent decades that it might seem to have run out of ideas. 28 Days Later seemed fresh in 2002 but the recent 28 Years Later felt as stale as The Walking Dead in its 10th season.
The most common trope in this sub-genre is to pose the question of whether its protagonists can trust other humans when they're no longer subject to the rules of a civilised society. Once again, that's the question at the heart of director RT Thorne's post-apocalyptic thriller 40 Acres, but in making the protagonist a black woman, the question is made more complicated.
Despite its racially-charged title, 40 Acres is less concerned with its protagonist being black and more with her being a mother. Thorne and co-writer Glenn Taylor are interested in examining how a mother might adapt to a ravaged world, and what she might do to keep her family safe. They say women become more conservative when they become mothers, but that's a very polite way of saying they become more xenophobic. A stranger is no longer a friend you haven't made yet but rather someone who hasn't harmed your children yet.
Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler) will do anything to keep her children safe from strangers. A descendent of escaped African-American slaves who established a farm in rural Canada, Hailey is now the matriarch of said farm. It's 14 years since a global pandemic wiped out 98% of the planet's animal life, making farmland the most desired resource. Hailey and her blended family - a post-apocalyptic Brady Bunch mix of Hailey's twentysomething son Manny (Kataem O'Connor) and the mixed-race children she bore with her First Nations husband Galen (Michael Greyeyes) - have become a finely honed military unit that knows just how to defend their farm. We get a violent demonstration of this in the film's arrestingly staged opening scene, in which Hailey and her clan massacre a group of gun-toting strangers who show up at their farm.
We initially assume that said strangers come with ill intentions, but as the narrative progresses, we begin to wonder if that was really the case. After all, Hailey and her family fired first, despite the intruders' claims of coming in peace. Might Hailey be akin to the protagonist of Richard Matheson's 'I am Legend', killing anything that moves because she wrongly assumes all other life to be a threat?
Such doubts begin to be harboured by Manny, who is growing restless as a young man stuck on the family farm. One day while out scavenging he spots a beautiful young woman bathing in a stream, and once his loins have been stirred, life on the ol' farm just won't be enough. That woman, Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas), later shows up at the perimeter of the farm claiming a group of cannibals have attacked her community. Afraid of what his mother might do if she finds Dawn, Manny keeps her captive in a disused barn.
40 Acres uses North America's fraught racial history to muddy its question of whether Hailey is a righteous defender of her family or a violent xenophobe. We're told a second civil war broke out soon after the pandemic, and though the film is a little unclear on this detail, it presumably spread north of the border to Canada. When Hailey hears the Union army has arrived in the area and is aiding farmers, she's righteously suspicious, citing black people's historical relationship with authority. Given the massacres of Natives carried out by the original Union army, Galen is even less willing to place his trust in its uniform.
But ultimately 40 Acres boils down to the conflict between Hailey and Manny, the former unwilling to give any strangers the benefit of the doubt, the latter recognising that if humanity is to carry on families will have to open their doors and let others in. We sympathise with both mother and son, but perhaps the core conflict here is an unspoken battle Hailey conducts with herself for her soul. Deadwyler adds an extra layer to this character with a performance that suggests for all the tough front Hailey presents to her family, her maternal defensive duties have eaten away at her humanity. Deadwyler continues to be one of the most interesting actors to emerge in recent years, and she fully sells Hailey as both an action hero and a mother.
40 Acres is in UK/ROI cinemas from August 1st and VOD from August 4th.
