AILSA CHANG, HOST:

When people talk about family farms being endangered, they usually mean that farmers are struggling with the economics of modern agribusiness. But the movie thriller "40 Acres" imagines a more physical danger. The film is set in a world of famine, violence and lots of guns. You will hear the guns in critic Bob Mondello's review, but he says the film also provides food for thought.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: The first images are of heavily armed intruders penetrating the perimeter of the Freeman family farm. Words onscreen tell us that it's 14 years since a fungal pandemic wiped out 98% of the world's animals, 12 years since a war caused by food chain disruption. The world's population has plummeted due to famine, but this little plot of land in rural Canada owned by a Black family that moved here after the American Civil War is an oasis of plenty, hence the intruders. A few approach the front of the house openly...

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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Greetings. It's a nice little farm you've got on this piece of land.

MONDELLO: ...While others sneak around the barn into the cornfield and discover the Freeman family, mostly women and children, is ready with knives...

(SOUNDBITE OF STABBING)

MONDELLO: ...And hatchets...

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MONDELLO: ...And finally gunfire.

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MONDELLO: They were ready because Hailey Freeman, played with steely resolve by Danielle Deadwyler, and her partner Galen, played by Michael Greyeyes, have brought them up to be. Hailey's a former soldier, still in radio contact with others.

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DANIELLE DEADWYLER: (As Hailey Freeman) Freeman 1 to Augusta 24, do you copy?

MONDELLO: But the news is rarely good.

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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) You've heard about the attacks by now?

DEADWYLER: (As Hailey Freeman) Thought your Union Army was going to come and take care of that.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) They're not. They're dead.

MONDELLO: So Hailey runs the farm as if she were its commanding officer, her kids cadets.

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DEADWYLER: (As Hailey Freeman) Everybody carries a sidearm and a radio at all times - in the fields, when you sleep, everywhere.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Some of these people are posing as Union soldiers and workers trying to get information. We can't trust what anyone says.

MONDELLO: It is no accident that first-time feature filmmaker R.T. Thorne framed this story around a family that is Black and Indigenous. The older generation doesn't trust outsiders because they've learned from experience that they can't.

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DEADWYLER: (As Hailey Freeman) You see anybody, double back, do not engage. These folks'll kill you for the boots on your feet.

MONDELLO: But the youngsters who have never known anything but the farm are chafing at their isolation. Seventeen-year-old Manny wonders if the sacrifice they make by being so cut off from the world is worth the safety it ensures.

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KATAEM O'CONNOR: (As Manny Freeman) If we brought in some help.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) From where?

KATAEM O'CONNOR: (As Manny Freeman) The network. Other farms. I don't know.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Exactly, you don't know. You got no idea what these people are like out there.

KATAEM O'CONNOR: (As Manny Freeman) Have you even tried talking to them?

DEADWYLER: (As Hailey Freeman) Boy, who the hell you think you're talking to? You got a roof over your head, food in your belly while half the world's starving, and you got the nerve to complain about that?

MONDELLO: But Manny, played by Kataem O'Connor, has ventured outside the farm a few times to trade food for supplies, also to swim in the river. And one day, he sees a young woman there and starts to think, maybe there's another way to live. The farm's generational divide is designed to hark back to civil rights and other social movements - veterans deeply skeptical of engagement, a younger cohort convinced that isolation is ultimately limiting. Director Thorne has said in interviews he was putting a dystopian frame on current concerns like food insecurity, an age of Black Lives Matter, indigenous land rights disputes. Though his film is often violent, he's had the good sense to use a gentler narrative framework to give "40 Acres" its punch - a mother and a son with different ideas on how best to face the end of the world. I'm Bob Mondello.

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JACOB BANKS: (Singing) What I've learned from a soldier, every man is assigned to a daughter. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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