‘40 Acres’ Review: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Where Survival Is the Only Way of Life

Danielle Deadwyler stars as a mother determined to protect her family and farm at all costs.

Danielle Deadwyler in “40 Acres.” (Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

Towards the end of the Civil War, an 1865 field order by Union General William Sherman declared that 400,000 acres of Confederate-controlled land would be redistributed to newly freed Black people in 40-acre lots, with a mule to till it (depending on who you ask) as a form of reparations.

Though hardly comparable to the atrocities Black people suffered for centuries, it was a start. Of course, Sherman’s field order never became federal policy and even today, this nation’s continued sins against Black people are barely acknowledged, let alone repaired. But in filmmaker R.T. Thorne’s debut sci-fi thriller “40 Acres,” one Black and Indigenous family has secured their due for generations and must fight to hold onto it.

Starring Danielle Deadwyler, “40 Acres” takes place in a post-apocalyptic near-future where all animals on Earth have succumbed to a disease and have been eradicated. As a result of the famines and global food chain collapses, farmland has become the most valuable resource. It’s every man for himself, as community can only be assured within the fenced-in boundaries of one’s own property.

Deadwyler is Hailey Freeman, a descendant of enslaved Africans in America who escaped to Canada and started a farm with 40 acres of land in 1865. She and her son Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor) have made a family on the farm with Hailey’s longtime Indigenous friend, Galen (Michael Greyeyes) and his daughter Raine (Leenah Robinson), and together Hailey and Galen have had two more daughters, Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) and Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc).

It takes no time for a militia of white men to try and take what they’ve built.

In the opening scene, the white gang creeps through the electric fence and weaves through the Freemans’ copious corn fields, guns drawn, assured that they have the numbers, the intellect and the element of surprise to take out one small family of six. They’re quickly disabused of that unearned confidence as the Freemans pick them off one by one before the others can even register what’s happening. Even the two youngest daughters show how quick and skillful they are with blades and guns, which their Army-trained mother has obviously drilled into them. It’s both badass and devastating.