40 Acres: Indie Preppers

This movie predicts that in the post-apocalyptic near-future, the most valuable commodity will be fertile agricultural land—exactly the sort of American farmland China has been buying at an alarming rate. The Freemans’ farm happens to be in Canada, but there is no way they would have ever sold, even in better days, because the family went through so much to get it. Unfortunately, outlaw gangs keep trying to steal it. The latest prospective claim-jumpers will be the most savage in R.T. Thorne’s 40 Acres, which opens today in theaters.

Viewers can see from the prologue Hailey Freeman and her family know how to protect what is theirs. That is why her ideologically-charged home-schooling curriculum makes absolutely no sense. They are preppers, through and through. A vague semblance of community persists, maintained by shortwave radio, but each week another farm goes dark. Freeman is not inclined to stick her neck out for anyone, but her son Emanuel has teenaged hormones and not a girl his age in sight. Not surprisingly, when he secretly spies Dawn enjoying a swimming hole during a scavenging trip, she makes quite an impression.

Unfortunately, the latest batch of marauders attacking family farms are particularly nasty, in ways similar to The Road. They aren’t just stealing food. They’re hunting it too. Is Dawn one of the cannibals or is she a post-apocalyptic normie? Emanuel probably wouldn’t be the best to judge.

At its core, 40 Acres is largely a prepper survival thriller in the tradition of Homestead and One Second After, but with casting and cosmetic stylistic changes made to appeal to diversity-conscious film fest audiences. Yet, it hits the same notes and offers the same takeaways as every previous prepper shoot-out. Basically, it boils down to: expect the worse and prepare yourself, first and foremost, by heavily arming your family.

Yet, by the standards of the genre, 40 Acres (an obvious reference to Union Gen. Tecumseh Sherman’s promise of reparations, which actually never mentioned the mule) is quite well made and surprisingly grabby.

The cast is consistently strong, especially Danielle Deadwyler, who maybe delivers a career best performance as the exhaustingly intense Freeman matriarch. Michael Greyeyes nicely compliments her as Freeman’s second husband, who projects a reassuring calm, but is really just as fiercely protective. Arguably, Elizabeth Saunders makes it all watchable with her scene-stealing comic relief (until stuff gets even more dire), as Freeman’s ex-marine crony, Augusta Taylor.

Our stories tell us who we are, so I now fear the worst, precisely because of films like 40 Acres. I once believed in people’s ability to come together in times of crisis, like we did in the days after 9/11. However, post-apocalyptic films like this keep telling us that in cataclysmic times, we will turn on each other and literally consume ourselves. At this point, we have told ourselves that our nature is such so many times, it is likely to come true. So, start buying guns and canned goods.

That is the ultimate message of 40 Acres, but at least it lays it all out in tensely compelling package. It works as white-knuckle, cautionary cinema, but it is a depressing assessment of humanity. Recommended for multicultural preppers, 40 Acres opens today (7/2) in theaters, including the AMC Empire in New York.