On demand: "40 Acres"

Like M. Night Shyamalan's The Village before it, some tension exists in the Canadian-shot indie horror 40 Acres as to whether events are taking place in the past, the future or some alternative present. Making the case for the past: that historically loaded title, and the fact the main characters go by the equally loaded name of Freeman. A few spare lines of onscreen preamble sketch a dystopian future where a fungal parasite has wiped out the biosphere, leaving farmland - where folks can grow corn from scratch and rebuild a parallel black market, founded on weed and moonshine - as the most valuable and sought after territory in all of North America. When our farmers enter the picture, however, we get the first inklings of an alternative present: these multicultural homesteaders, driven out of urban population hubs by famine and led by Danielle Deadwyler on close-cropped badass form, find themselves newly targeted by rapacious white militia groups keen to take back this land while erasing all those living on it. The backdrop is one familiar from those Quiet Place movies and the recent 28 Years Later - a society that's collapsed and subsequently been reclaimed by nature, leaving homo sapiens to fight among itself. Yet the race angle renews and refreshes it. The Freemans practice Black Panther-like tribal rituals, and Deadwyler's Mama Freeman assigns her worker bees a formidable reading list; her Native American partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) cites Luther Standing Bear in insisting "it is the mothers, not the warriors, who create a people and guide their destiny". 40 Acres would have felt more celebratory, and may have played in cinemas longer than a weekend, had Kamala won the election; as it is, the other candidate won, reframing this production overnight as something else: a striking parable of struggle and resistance, and of parenting in a harsh to murderously indifferent world.

Watching this measured mix of scenesetting, character development and woodland action, you start to wonder whether co-writer/director RT Thorne, making his feature debut after long years of apprenticing on music videos and serial television, has cagily hedged his bets: here is a story you feel could easily be repackaged into a Walking Dead-style cable TV pilot if it wasn't commissioned as a movie. (Or, indeed, vice versa.) Some of the film's considerable narrative detail strikes the eye as generic: Mama's eldest son Manny (Kataem O'Connor) is coming of age amid this hellscape, developing a dreamy fixation on the outsider girl he spies bathing at a nearby lake and thereby risking both the integrity of the farm and his guarded mother's wrath. The broader focus on a ragtag extended family - as distinct from the far tighter familial units of the Quiet Places - threatens to leave 40 Acres a little diffuse by comparison: at several junctures, Thorne feels obliged to cut away just when the intensity is building, not unlike a TV director juggling A and B plots. Approaching this world from a variety of angles does however foster an appropriately crouched and defensive atmosphere; unlike the hyper and somewhat distractible 28 Years Later, forever bouncing ahead to the next encounter in Danny Boyle's trademark Tiggerish style, Thorne allows us to soak up and properly feel the Freemans' fear of a world gone feral-wild. (Again, we might wonder whether this world reflects the past, the present or the future.) In her still relatively young big-screen career, Deadwyler has impressed in both serious awards-corridor drama (Till) and half-assed multiplex silliness (The Woman in the Yard). Here again, she proves a forceful and arresting centrepoint, getting us to share the psychic and emotional weight of all this struggle, and cutting through this script's soapier elements with a sharp look or word, or a knife to the thorax.

40 Acres is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.