‘40 Acres’ reinvigorates an old action genre with provocative new blood

“40 Acres” — 3.5 stars

“40 Acres” is a genre movie the way genre movies are supposed to be but rarely are. It invigorates an old premise with fresh ideas, layers well-crafted action with thematic richness, boasts committed performances and is so taut with tension that the audience might snap before the characters do.

Best of all, it features the brilliant actress Danielle Deadwyler as a ferocious postapocalyptic Mother Courage. Deadwyler should have been Oscar-nominated for playing Emmett Till’s mother in “Till” (2022) and as the sister in “The Piano Lesson” (2024); she’s a stage-trained artist who brings riveting emotional authenticity to whatever she does, whether it’s classy, like those two earlier movies, or mean and lowdown, like this new one.

The setting is 12 years after a pandemic, a second civil war and the onset of a global famine; “the most valuable resource is farmland,” an opening title tells us. Up in Ontario, the Freeman family is holding down a patch of fertile land: Matriarch Hailey (Deadwyler), her husband, Galen (Michael Greyeyes of “True Detective”), Hailey’s grown son Manny (Kataem O’Connor), Galen’s two teenage daughters Raine (Leenah Robinson) and Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc), and the couple’s young daughter Cookie (Haile Amare). Times being what they are, all the Freemans, except the youngest, are extremely proficient with firearms, as is made clear with the swift dispatch of a crew of malevolent good-old-boy interlopers in the very first scene.

Both parents are strict about observing the rules that have kept the family alive, but Hailey is the drill sergeant, a veteran of a post-collapse Union Army who has seen untold horrors and vows to protect her children from them. The kids and their parents are simultaneously peaceful agrarians, trading their crops with other farms in a loose survivalist network, and highly trained killers with a battle plan for every contingency.

It matters very much in “40 Acres” that Hailey is Black, Galen is Indigenous and their children are mixed. Director R.T. Thorne is a Black Canadian filmmaker making his feature debut, co-writing the script with Glenn Taylor and Lora Campbell, and the resonances of the film’s farmers of color holding down their territory are powerful indeed, from the movie’s title to its reinvention of North America’s barbaric racial past as a siege narrative. The movie doesn’t make a big deal of the fact that the attackers are almost all white men. It doesn’t have to.

If Galen is the well-armed nurturer of the couple, often speaking to his daughters in Cree to pass the language to the next generation, Hailey is the justifiably paranoid hard-liner, and her ferocity is rooted in history. The farm, she reminds the children, has been in her family since the 1850s, when Hailey’s ancestor escaped to Canada from slavery in Georgia. It’s not just her children who need protecting, it’s all the ghosts that came before.

The plot of “40 Acres” follows the growing rebellion of Manny against his mother’s dictatorial rule — O’Connor gives the character a gentleness that’s more dangerous than any outright defiance — amid rumors of an army of cannibal marauders laying waste to the other farms. Where a more traditional moviemaker might lean hard on the horror aspects, Thorne favors suspense, and the film is as tight as a drum for 90 long minutes before all hell breaks loose in the home stretch.

The smoothly gliding camerawork, the evocative score — brooding movie music with brief eruptions of hip-hop — the squeezing of every bit of juice from a minimal budget and minimalist location: These are all hallmarks of a born director.

“40 Acres” courts familiarity at times — the young woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) who appears at the compound gates is attractive enough to throw virginal Manny for a loop, because of course she is — but the film’s focus on the family dynamic, with every member except the youngest registering as a distinct, complex personality, keeps a viewer locked in.

Of these, Deadwyler’s Hailey is first and most feral among equals, and the movie’s dramatic subtext is not only the battle of wills between a warrior mother and a son ready to find out who he is, but the battle within Hailey herself. The actress lets us glimpse beneath her character’s unyielding armor the terror of a woman who has seen the worst the world can do to its children and who has obliterated her own softness to keep them safe.

For a person of color, of course, “the worst the world can do” refers not just to the depredations of the postapocalypse but to everything that has come before. Thorne doesn’t overload his tale with symbolic freight — again, he doesn’t have to — and he tends to the film’s action with skill, verve, blood and finesse while letting the larger meanings take care of themselves.

In this, “40 Acres” stands in comparison with the summer’s big hit, “Sinners,” in which Ryan Coogler uses the vampire genre to tell a history of America’s cultural blood sucking. Thorne’s film is less outwardly ambitious while realizing every one of its goals within the framework of a simmering, finely tuned dystopian drama. This is a movie to see and a director to watch.

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In theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violent content and language. 113 minutes.