Directed by R.T. Thorne | Written by Thorne, Glenn Taylor, and Lora Campbell  |  113 min | ▲▲▲▲ | VOD

For a national cinema culture that seems weirdly allergic to genre, we can be proud in Canada of the quality thrillers, horrors, and sci-fi movies that bubble up, especially ones with Indigenous roots: Consider Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, Danis Goulet’s Night Raiders, and Nyla Innuksuk’s Slash/Back.

Now we have Toronto-based, Black filmmaker RT Thorne who hails from the TV and music video world making a real splash with his first feature, a dystopic horror shot up around Sudbury, Ontario. It shares some themes with the recent 28 Years Later — it considers our character when civilization is stripped down to the bolts, what remains of humanity and how to sustain trust in other people. It’s just that 40 Acres is the better movie.

We’re not among survivors of a zombie apocalypse in this story, but we may as well be — the text off the top suggests years ago a fungal pandemic killed off most of the animal life on the planet, followed by war and a famine. These are the Freemans, a very well-armed family who live on a farm in the woods. Mom, Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler, hardcore), is a veteran and she raised her kids to survive in this new world order — they don’t flinch when they have to kill cannibals who wander onto their land. Joining her on the farm is her partner, Galen (the always welcome Michael Greyeyes), and teen- and tween-aged girls Raine (Leenah Robinson), Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc), and Cookie (Haile Amare), but the film’s key relationship is between Hailey and Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor), her eldest boy, now an adult.

Emanuel is bridling beneath Hailey’s bootcamp regimen. He just wants to meet a girl, who can blame him? Eventually he does, Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) who he spots outside the electric fence perimeter, but he has to hide her from his mother who likes to shoot first and ask questions later.

Hailey’s paranoia has plenty of real world inspiration. Those cannibal raiders are always out there, disrupting a network of farms who check in over the shortwave on the regular. And while none of this is fresh for anyone who’s watched The Walking Dead or The Last Of Us, what Thorne brings here isn’t just presenting Black and Indigenous actors with accompanying cultural notes, its an intimacy and care to detail in their very exclusive world that provides a level of plausibility. A few moments of humour don’t go astray, either.

Not everything moves smoothly for Thorne’s first feature effort — his film is edited to within an inch of its life. In an effort, presumably, to maintain a certain narrative locomotion. A number of interstitial moments seem entirely absent as we jump pell mell from scene to scene. But what Thorne has is a real knack for action sequences — his prowling, impressive camera captures a lot of tactile, intense hand-to-hand combat and automatic rifle fire, and no hesitation with bringing on serious gore when necessary. One highlight is a scene of Greyeyes taking down a room full of baddies, lit only by machine gun report.

The greatest takeaway from 40 Acres may be that it turns Danielle Deadwyler into a genuine action star. I hope Hollywood is paying attention.