The family that kills together stays together in this apocalypse with a twist

40 ACRES
Directed by R.T. Thorne
Written by Thorne and Glenn Taylor
(MA), 113 minutes
★★★

For an illustration of how family values can co-exist with extreme violence, you couldn’t do better than the opening of 40 Acres, the arresting first feature by the Canadian writer-director R.T. Thorne.

A group of scruffy guys armed with pistols sneak through a cornfield towards a farmhouse, plainly up to no good. Within a few minutes they’ve all been matter-of-factly slaughtered by the tight-knit clan defending their turf: former soldier Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler), her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes), and their three kids.

“I got a headshot,” brags Cookie (Haile Amare), the youngest girl, as if discussing her score in a video game. Her mother reproves her for wasting bullets: “Use your blade next time.”

These are, let’s be clear, the good guys, in a post-apocalyptic world where it’s necessary to do whatever it takes to survive. Or is it that simple? The quite original, if not especially credible, set-up devised by Thorne and co-writer Glenn Taylor is meant to challenge our moral certainties, for a while at least.

We’re in the aftermath of a pandemic, but not the kind that turns people into zombies. Indeed, the human race wasn’t directly affected. But most of the animal kingdom has been wiped out, presumably including birds, fish and even insects, although I thought at one point I heard the sound of cicadas.

Anyway, if you want to eat you have only two options: you can raise crops, if you have the land to do so, or you can turn cannibal, which was the road taken by the unlucky marauders at the outset.

Those guys were all white, which holds special significance because Hailey is African-American – the farmhouse has been in her family ever since a 19th-century ancestor escaped slavery and fled to Canada – and Galen is Native American.

In other words, Thorne has consciously set out to flip the script of the kind of old-fashioned Western or exotic adventure story where non-white hordes are treated as cannon fodder.

Thus, he’s able to have it both ways, staging grisly action sequences with unapologetic verve while still leaving us scope to take the story seriously as allegory.

His star’s brand of seriousness is more literal. Hailey could have been played as a larger-than-life archetype, the ultimate protective mother – but Deadwyler commits to the scenario as fully as her character, credibly showing us the emotional cost of spending every waking moment in a state of hyper-vigilance.

Kataem O’Connor, as Hailey’s adolescent son, and Milcania Diaz-Rojas, as a stranger who wanders onto the property, belong by comparison to the world of young-adult fantasy, where the collapse of civilisation is merely a backdrop for the protagonists’ coming of age.

40 Acres doesn’t entirely cohere – and the ending tries to smooth over the more jarring aspects. But you’re almost certain to leave feeling shaken up – in a good way.

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