Written and directed by James DeMonaco, The Purge suggests a hardcore approach to the same idea: Get-It-Out-Of-Your-System Day. The film is set less than a decade in the future, with the U.S. under a reactionary and apparently theocratic government. “Our New Founding Fathers” have established an annual twelve-hour period of sanctioned anarchy: Any crime, including murder, is legal, and no emergency services are available. Supposedly this vile license provides a catharsis that stabilizes society, and has lowered the crime rate and improved the economy. So every year, ordinary folks run wild in the streets assaulting each other, while the suburban affluent party, or hunker down with their families, behind fortress-like security systems.
James (Ethan Hawke) has become wealthy selling these systems to his gated-community neighbors. He’s planning a quiet Purge Night in with his family: beautiful, reserved wife Mary (Lena Heady), lovely teenage daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane), of whose boyfriend James doesn’t approve, and weird but goodhearted adolescent son Charlie (Max Burkolder), who’s a secretive tech whiz.
All, it need hardly be said, does not go smoothly. Charlie sees a homeless black man (Edwin Hodge), wounded, outside the house on the security camera, pleading for shelter from approaching attackers. Before his parents can object, he opens the metal shutters long enough for the man to run inside.
Soon after, the man’s pursuers, a group of masked blueblood kids who were hunting him Most Dangerous Game-style, surround the house, demand their quarry be returned to them alive, and observe that they’ll soon be joined by trucks with the necessary horsepower to pry the place open. From here, The Purge gradually descends into a more or less standard grindhouse-style siege thriller, with elements of the original Night of the Living Dead, Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, and—maybe—the mostly forgotten 1971 sleazo shocker The Night God Screamed.
After the screening of The Purge I heard many of my fellow audience members vigorously poking holes in its logic. While I’m not as sure as they are that the overall concept is utterly implausible, in the form it takes here it does, admittedly, seem pretty dubious. But I found I didn’t care while watching it—because of its direct attention to class (unless I missed it, race is never mentioned, not even the homeless man’s), the movie has a nasty, unsavory tension that got to me, especially early on, before it turns to routine stalk-shock.
The acting ensemble is up to the requirements of the material. Hawke is believable, Heady manages some moving moments, and, toward the end, some grimly funny moments as well, and the kids are both sweet. But the standout in the cast was Australian actor Rhys Wakefield, billed simply as “Polite Stranger”—the sadistic Richie Rich who leads the besiegers. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie villain this loathsome, one I wanted to see defeated and tortured as badly as this twisted One-Percenter.
But this response on my part is, of course, an irony at the movie’s core. At one point, when the family has their would-be murderers at gunpoint, the audience, with Pavlovian predictability, called out “Come on! Kill ‘em!” The societal function served in this movie by Purge Night is partly served, in our society, by movies like The Purge. Let’s hope it stays that way.
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