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Hailey Freeman, the matriarch at the center of 40 Acres, can take care of herself. You know this even before you get the scoop on who this woman is, where she’s come from, and the people and the land she’s willing to risk life and limb to defend. But just for fun, here are some facts: Once upon a time, Freeman was a soldier for the U.S. military. Several generations ago, her great-great grandfather escaped a plantation in Georgia where he was enslaved and headed to the Canadian wilderness. He established a farm, which has been in Freeman’s family for centuries. Now, Hailey and her partner, an indigenous gentleman named Galen, are raising their family there and working their best to till the soil.
A few other things to note: When we meet the Freemans, they’re 14 years out from the effects of a fungal pandemic that has, per a title card, “decimated 98% of the animal biosphere”; 12 years removed from the beginning of a massive, ongoing civil war; and in the 11th year of a devastating famine. Attacks on their household are a regular occurrence. They have to fight tooth and nail to survive. The kind of land they own in the Great White North is no longer just land. It’s the single most valuable resource on in a North America characterized by literal and metaphorical scorched earth. Naturally, that means others want to take it. And thanks to Hailey, the Freemans know exactly how to stand their ground by any means necessary.
So far, so very Dystopian Cinema 101 — but this spin on a now extremely familiar scenario has one huge advantage in its favor. It’s not that filmmaker R.T. Thorne, a prolific Canadian TV director making his feature debut, isn’t proficient at staging the sort of action scenes that a postapocalyptic thriller lives or dies by; the opening sequence, in which a band of roving marauders are picked off one by one as they attempt a takeover, couldn’t be better put together or paced. Or that, despite a few notable weak links, the ensemble cast is more or less up to the task (Michael Greyeyes, the Cree actor who plays Galen, is especially great; track down his scathing 2021 drama Wild Indian if you’ve never seen it). Or the fact that this agrarian take on the end of the world is as smart or as culturally specific as it is nerve-shredding. Name another horror-inflected survivalist narrative that deftly uses a specific Reconstruction-era namecheck as a starting point to fill in gaps about American history and Black history, specifically the migration of former slaves to Canada prior to the 13th amendment.
All of which distinguishes 40 Acres from your run-of-the-mill, Walking Dead-style tale of violently piecing together a life in the aftermath of catastrophe. But the real secret sauce is the movie’s lead. Danielle Deadwyler has been building up a resumé that includes extraordinary, attention-must-be-paid turns in biopics (Till, for which she should have been nominated for an Oscar), big-name dramas (The Piano Lesson), prestige TV (Station Eleven), and an assortment of pulp fictions (The Harder They Fall, Carry-On, The Woman in the Yard). Plus she’s a big part of the best episode in the new season of The Bear. It’s not just that Deadwyler can elevate a project from merely interesting to damn near arresting. It’s the way she brings a true sense of lived-in, fleshed-out humanity to every part she plays, no matter how small the role nor how rickety the vehicle.
And as Hailey Freeman, Deadwyler gives you a woman who’s been seriously tested in every way possible, and has become stronger for it. Hailey must be a strict, protective mother out of necessity, given that she’s raising four kids in a world that’s falling apart and her oldest, Emanuel (Kateem O’Connor), is fully in his rebellious stage. Life as a survivalist has honed the fighting skills she learned in the military, and those skills have been passed on to her brood. She can casually toss off radio banter with a fellow matriarch farmer (Elizabeth Saunders) who’s part of a network of rural collectives. When chatter about cannibalistic ravagers attacking homesteaders begins to get louder and more frequent, you have no doubt that she’s ready for war.
Yet the constant need to be on the defensive has taken a toll on Freeman, and the way that Deadwyler juggles the terror, the trauma, the take-no-shit attitude and the tender feelings she has for her loved ones, all without resorting to telegraphing a performance via bigger-than-life gestures, is astounding. She’s not better than the movie. Deadwyler just makes the movie better by every choice she’s making as an actor, in a way that goes beyond simply understanding the assignment. There’s enough genre elements in this worst-case-scenario parable, from righteous kills to gory sieges to tense cat-and-mouse games, to satisfy folks who just want a few pleasurably cheap thrills. Deadwyler is what makes 40 Acres feel like there’s something special happening here. The script has brains. Her Hailey has heart and soul. She gives us the postapocalyptic hero we deserve.
