‘The Purge’

The Purge is an enthusiastically dopey allegory about American class warfare – about the way we’ve woven cruelty into our national moral fabric. To its tremendous credit, the film doesn’t let go of this idea from the first frame to the last. It’s easy to pretend the importance by tossing some handwavey parallels or vague references to social issues into an otherwise indifferent genre flick (see Hostel); but it’s much harder to craft a focused metaphor that animates every scene, and harder still to do so in the midst of a tight, tense thriller set almost entirely inside one house. This is a very impressive second feature from career screenwriter James DeMonaco.

In the near future, following a devastating recession, America’s “new founding fathers” establish “the purge”: one night a year, where all crime, up to and including murder, is permissible.  This serves three purposes. First, it lets Americans blow off steam – direct their very American rage in a way that keeps it bottled up the other 364 days of the year.  Second, it boosts the economy, as the wealthy buy expensive security systems and weapons to go “hunting.” Third, it cleanses the nation of the poor and desperate, a sort of hard reset for the lower rungs of society. And it works. Unemployment is at one percent and everyday crime has plummeted to barely-measurable levels. Citizens are encouraged to buy and display blue flowers in support of the annual tradition.

The film opens as a security salesman (Ethan Hawke), his wife (Lena Headey), and his two kids (Max Burkholder and Adelaide Kane), are getting ready to lock down and settle in for a peaceful Purge at home. (As a taste of the lack of subtlety here, the father tells the young son: “Some bad things are going to happen tonight, but we can afford protection.”) Needless to say, all will not go smoothly.

But The Purge is not a simple piece of make-it-through-the-night survival horror. Instead, the film quickly poses a quandary: the boy, convinced that the Purge is fundamentally cruel and immoral, opens the front door to admit a homeless man screaming for help in the middle of the deserted streets of their gated community. This brings forth a gang of psychopathic prep school teens, led by a creepy Rhys Wakefield, who were hunting the man and demand that their quarry be delivered up, alive, or they’ll kill everyone in the house.

The rest of the film is a fairly effective little thriller, as the lights go out, desperation mounts, and the family’s homeless guest decides that he isn’t happy to cooperate. (By way of a quibble I will say that the movie is a little cavalier with respect to the continuity of the characters’ physical locations, and the availability of weapons.) More importantly, most of its suspense is generated by the morality play at its center. We instinctively sense that Hawke’s character isn’t a bad guy – he dotes on his daughter and tries hard to have a nice dinner conversation before the chaos starts – but he’s bought into the purge so wholesale that his moral compass and ours are fundamentally misaligned: he’s ready to hand the poor victim over. It’s him or us, he tells his family, and we have the means to make it him. His son (who had earlier asked him why he and his wife weren’t out hunting poor people themselves) isn’t so sure.

The last half hour offers a few twists and reversals that made the audience at my screening guffaw and giggle. They’re goofy, objectively, but DeMonaco sells them with his commitment to his central conceit and metaphor. The bad guys and the good guys in The Purge profit from the squashing of the poor and helpless – are proud of it, worship it, insist that their victims are grist for the mill, inevitable sacrifices to make the world a better place. If that sounds a little familiar, well, the movie doesn’t mind.

Grade: B