Danielle Deadwyler in 40 Acres

40 ACRES
Directed by R T Thorne
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆☆

THIS post-apocalypse Canadian adventure feels like a real-time response to the country’s closest neighbour taking collective leave of their political senses.

Alien invasion movies proliferated during the red scares of the 1950s. Vietnam and civil rights prompted sci-fi and other genres to reflect on the breakdown of conservative America and the rise of the permissive society.

This film about a Canadian farming family fighting off marauding cannibals feels like it is an artistic reflection on the impact having an anti-science, White-power neo-Christian in the White House has had on the Canadian psyche. Batten down the hatches, our next door neighbours have taken leave of their senses.

We learn that a fungus has wiped out 98 per cent of the animal biosphere (while somehow sparing humans).

Civil war breaks out as food becomes scarce – and as society dissolves, the only thing worth having is usable farm land.

We meet a family on a homestead in Canada: we learn they are descendants of migrants who left the USA after the civil war and forged a new life in the free air of the Northern Territories.

This scene-setting ties the family to the land and gives the story a contemporary relevance: with Trump’s America creating a new concept of what the USA stands for, Thorne has used this historical backstory to reflect on the dystopian nightmare Trumpian political thought harks for.

Led by powerful matriarch Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler), they have created a fortress and will defend their property against all comers.

The Freemans keep in touch with other farms in the area, families Hailey trusts and can occasionally barter with – they swap marojuana for moonshine. Hailey trades with another matriarch from nearby – Augusta Taylor (Elizabeth Saunders) – and their relationship illustrates the concept of how community ties are vital, and how lost we would be without them.

But marauding groups of cannibals are coming through and the isolated outpost the family have enjoyed is now under threat.

Teen son Manny (Kateam O’Connor) feels the tension of being a young man closetted inside electric fencing. He takes to going on sojourns outside the family’s boundary and after swimming in a creek, he meets and befriends Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) from a nearby farmstead. She represents a lost world where friendships were forged on trust. Today, Hailey asks: who can the family rely on? Her answer is no one but themselves.

This is but one strand of various plotlines and enhances the sense of claustrophobia – no mean feat considering the plentiful vistas of virgin forest that helps set the scenes.