40 ACRES - Mark Reviews Movies

40 Acres, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 1, 2025

The world is essentially in ruins at the start of 40 Acres. If the fungal pandemic that started the collapse wasn't enough, the resulting wars would have finished the job, but then, there was also the blight on survivors' crops that followed. All things considered, the family at the center of this story doesn't have it too bad, relatively speaking, but as the text prologue makes clear, things can always get worse.

The story here, from director R.T. Thorne and Glenn Taylor's screenplay, is very much about how bad things can get for the family led by military veteran Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler). She has survived disease, war, and famine to come out the other side as someone who doesn't take any unnecessary risks, is determined to protect her loved ones, and will kill anyone who could be a threat to their survival. That is, of course, unless the plot can't move forward if she sticks to those rules, but she's tough enough to earn a little generosity in such matters.

Deadwyler has quickly become one of the strongest and most versatile actresses of her generation, and her performance in this movie definitely elevates what's otherwise a pretty familiar tale of post-apocalyptic survival and action. She's deadly convincing as a cunning strategist, a ruthless protector, and a more-than-able fighter, holed up on the farm that has been in her family since Hailey's ancestors escaped slavery in Georgia and bought the land in Canada. The character has only one driving motive: to defend those whom she loves, even if that means they might resent her for also ensuring that her four children are prepared to be as strong as she is if anything should happen to their mother.

The family, by the way, is a mixed one, made up of her teenaged son Manny (Kataem O'Connor) from a previous marriage, her new husband Galen (Michael Greyeyes), his daughter from a former relationship Raine (Leenah Robinson), and the couple's own two daughters, Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc) and Cookie (Haile Amare). In the opening sequence, we watch as the entire group works together to ambush intruders on their land—sniping from a window, catching scouts who make inside some buildings off guard, hiding among the crops to make sure no stragglers escape. Immediately, Thorne establishes the sort of unforgiving world and protagonist these are, because it is what's necessary.

When focused on that, the movie itself is unrelenting in its bleakness, from Hailey ordering the quiet Manny to execute an invader who wasn't killed in the ambush, to the mother's insistence that any neighbor's request for help cannot be fulfilled, and to rumors that a gang even worse than those raiders from the beginning is on the hunt. That last part will become the foundation of the very busy third act, when the family basically has to go through the entire opening sequence again—only this time with the threat of cannibals in their midst.

In between those two action sequences, the story has difficulty finding some real grounding, mainly because several of its main characters only seem to matter to even the odds during the fighting. The screenplay doesn't offer much time, consideration, or characterization to, say, Galen and the daughters, who become strangely distracting comic relief at moments of peril. Essentially, the movie exists in two different forms, the stuff to do with the characters and the action beats, and since the only real conflict amongst our protagonists exists between the mother and the son, we can sense the filmmakers sidelining everyone and everything else when they aren't required to increase the defense's numbers.

To be fair, that disagreement between Hailey and Manny is a worthwhile one—if, again, familiar for this kind of story. Quite the opposite of his mother, Manny doesn't want what there is to his life to come down to routine chores and violence when it's necessary.

After sneaking away from a regular patrol on the farm grounds, he makes his way to a river, where he spots a young woman named Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas), swimming and posing on the shore while Manny dedicates the sight to memory. She shows up at the electrified fence bordering the property later, begging Manny for help. While he does bound and gag her in case she's trouble, Dawn eventually convinces him that she's a neighbor, that the rest of the farmers in the area have been killed or captured by the cannibals, and that they need help.

A lot of this confusion and the resulting conflict could have been avoided with a couple of characters actually getting to the point, instead of acting as if they're in a story that wants the audience to wonder if there's something else going on here. It's frustrating at times, especially because so many of the members of this family are overlooked for this roundabout plotting, but that feeling is primarily because the mood of the movie can be so effectively, oppressively hopeless.

There's a stronger possible narrative, in other words, than the one we get from 40 Acres (The structure, which breaks up the plot with some flashbacks, hints at but doesn't develop some ideas about Hailey, her family, and her connection to those neighbors). The atmosphere, the action, and Deadwyler's performance can't be dismissed so easily, to be sure, so it's mostly disappointing the story can't match the potency of those elements.

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