Panic Fest 2025: R.T. Thorne’s 40 Acres confirms Danielle Deadwyler is the latest iconic star in horror
The Panic Fest horror/genre film festival is currently running in KC for its 2025 season at Screenland Armour. These film reviews are from indie and studio horror/comedy/sci-fi features premiering right now in the Northland, or hitting major theaters/VOD soon. Catch up with all our coverage here and there’s still time to get tickets for individual screenings at the Panic Fest 2025 website.
In case you didn’t already notice in The Woman in the Yard, Danielle Deadwyler has an excellent face for horror. Her big, wide-set eyes and expressive brows allow her to communicate shock, anger, sorrow and fear with a single look. Deadwyler’s striking physicality gives her performances a lot of interiority, an asset that served her well in dramatic projects like Till and The Harder They Fall. It ascends to a new level in R.T. Thorne’s post-apocalyptic horror-thriller 40 Acres.
Deadwyler plays Hailey Freeman, a farmer living on her family’s generations-old land in Canada, and trying to raise a family of her own in the wake of a global famine. A quick prologue tells us a fungal scourge destroyed the world’s crops, followed by a civil war over the last remaining resources. Following the collapse of society, farmland is a precious commodity. Hailey farms and defends the land with the help of her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) and the blended family they’ve created together: Hailey’s son Manny (Kataem O’Connor), Galen’s daughter Raine (Leenah Robinson), and the couple’s two daughters Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc) and Cookie (Haile Amare).
Hailey, Galen and the kids do pretty well for themselves; they have more than enough food, can scavenge most of what they need, and know how to handle weapons and do basic first aid, thanks to Hailey and Galen’s military backgrounds. However, it’s an isolated existence. Hailey distrusts everyone outside her own family, including other farmers in the area. She’s got a good reason — roving gangs of violent cannibals roam the fields looking for land they can take. After years of living alone, Manny in particular is starting to chafe at his mom’s constraints. Their conflict escalates when an unfamiliar girl named Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) shows up at the farm looking for help.
For many, the words “fungal scourge” will immediately conjure images of The Last of Us, a show that 40 Acres shares so much with functionally that it could just as well be a one-off episode. Thorne’s society-ending plague only impacts crops and animals — no clickers here — but the idea that everyone is trying to survive and find a safe place to get by is certainly of a piece with the HBO show and the video game it’s based on. It does mean that, apart from the film’s cast and the cultural histories they represent, 40 Acres lacks a little originality.
Thorne’s film gets a lot of mileage out of its Black and Indigenous cast, however, that just about makes up for its familiarity in all other areas. Fans of the 2019 zombie movie Blood Quantum (also, coincidentally, starring Greyeyes) will find similar points of interest in 40 Acres. In addition to its themes of survival, parenting and generational trauma, Thorne’s movie comments on the legacy of Black farmers in Canada and Indigenous rights and land practices, as well as both communities’ histories of activism. Thorne points to these as reasons why his characters not only survive but thrive in the situation he creates for them.
The MVPs, no surprise, are Deadwyler and Greyeyes, whose dynamics balance each other well. Deadwyler uses those big eyes and a grim-set mouth to project a tough-as-nails exterior, but that’s not all her character is. Hailey has never trusted others easily and feels she has to pass that trait on to her kids, but simultaneously fears what her parenting will do to her relationship with them. Greyeyes’ Galen, by contrast, is charismatic and amiable, but can become harsh and ruthless as soon as the moment calls for it. You get so used to him showing up to lighten the mood that as soon as that switch flips, it makes you sit up and take notice.
While 40 Acres doesn’t break the mold with its plot, which we’ve seen a lot of lately, its layered characters are worth paying attention to. There’s just enough that’s unique about this movie for it to stand out among the (many) others of its kind. If you like your post-apocalypse survival horror flavored with Octavia Butler and Braiding Sweetgrass, this may be the movie for you.
