Review: 40 Acres Is a Brutal, Beautiful Glimpse Into Our Cannibal Future

Danielle Deadwyler leads a post-collapse family in RT Thorne’s unflinching apocalyptic vision.

R.T. Thorne’s 40 Acres is the kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare that hits close to the bone—because it feels all too plausible. Releasing July 2, the film is a genre-defying sci-fi-horror thriller packed with urgency, history, and raw human emotion. With a powerhouse lead performance from Danielle Deadwyler (Till), the film examines what happens when society collapses—not just structurally, but spiritually.

Set in a near-future North America ravaged by ecological collapse and civil war, 40 Acres follows the Freeman family, a blended unit of American refugees and Indigenous landkeepers trying to survive on a remote farm in Canada. The world’s livestock is gone. Food is scarce. And people have started eating people.

As Haley Freeman, Deadwyler channels steely discipline and barely masked trauma, a former military officer now raising her kids as off-grid survivalists. Her co-parent Galen (Michael Greyeyes), speaking mostly in his native tongue, reminds us that the land holds memories—ancestral and monstrous alike. Their children, including standout performances from Elizabeth Saunderson and Kem O’Connor, are soldiers of routine: farming, combat, discipline. Childhood, as we know it, is a luxury long extinct.

Where 40 Acres sinks its fangs deepest is in its refusal to sanitize the post-collapse world. It’s a universe where cannibalism is normalized, trust is extinct, and humanity feels like a distant rumor. But Thorne resists turning the film into a nihilistic dirge. Instead, he complicates the landscape with moral ambiguity: Who deserves forgiveness? What’s the cost of survival? And when you’ve lost everything that made you human—how do you get it back?

The film isn’t without structural friction. The chapter-based storytelling sometimes disrupts the momentum, and the use of character flashbacks can feel better suited for prestige TV than a tight feature. But when it works—and it often does—it lands like a gut punch. The cinematography is stunning, the action scenes clean and grounded, and the thematic depth earns your attention.

If The Walking Dead made zombies a metaphor for societal collapse, 40 Acres strips away the undead and reveals that we never needed monsters—we are them. This isn’t horror built on jump scares. It’s horror born of truth: that when the systems fail, the beast beneath will rise.

For fans of Children of Men, The Road, or even It Comes at Night, 40 Acres offers a gripping, emotionally charged addition to the canon of survival horror. It’s a hard film to watch—and an even harder one to forget.

Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5 out of 5)

Unflinching, timely, and deeply resonant—40 Acres is a future we pray never comes, but one we can’t afford to ignore.