by Brett Parker
When horror flicks are on their game, they can pack more unwelcome ideological thoughts than any hotbed political thriller. That’s why it’s hard not to marvel at The Purge, a simple and economical home invasion thriller that touches on an ocean of decaying morals lurking beneath the American dream. To be sure, the movie is an assembly of horror movie standards we’ve seen many times before, but the way they evoke disturbing secrets about the world we live in now is rather impressive. Reflecting on the movie long after the credits have rolled, I’d have to reach back to Funny Games or the original Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to recall a thriller that unnerved me to my core like this one.
The film imagines a future America where once a year, the nation hosts a 12-hour period where all crime is legal. A random holiday devotes it’s evening hours to allowing every american the chance to rob, steal, rape, break, and murder everything in their path with zero repercussions. All medical and police personal are suspended during that time, and Americans waste no time in destroying property and blowing their fellow man away with bloody glee. The next day, the bodies are cleaned up and property is restored and the nation gets back to normal. Supposedly, this window of release for the citizens has allowed the country to grow into a dream haven where unemployment and crime is at an all-time low, allowing the blissful end to justify the horrifying means.
We follow an upper-class suburban family during one of these annual purges. Security expert James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) has made a fortune selling state-of-the-art security systems, allowing himself and his privileged neighbors to lock themselves down extra-tight during the chaotic holiday. So Sandin plans on spending his purge like he does every year: by locking himself inside his home with his lovely wife, Mary (Lena Headey), and his two children, Charlie (Max Burkholder) and Zoey (Adelaide Kane). Yet as the annual purge commences, scary violence shows up right on their doorstep when Charlie allows a Bloody Stranger (Edwin Hodge) to seek shelter in their home. It turns out the Stranger is hiding from a group of upper-class psychopaths who are hungry to kill him. A Polite Stranger (Rhys Wakefield) who leads the group informs Sandin that if they don’t give up their target, then they will penetrate the security system and murder everyone inside. This causes the ordinary family to question their morals and strength as they try to wrestle down their bloody houseguest and fend off the bloodthirsty gang gnawing at their front gates.
The Purge is one of those horror flicks that efficiently uses limited, low-budget resources to evoke giant scares with cinematic shrewdness. Even though the film’s central idea hinges on a deadly event played out on a grand national scale, the film’s action is entirely confined to a suburban home, using dark shadows and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night to get its scares. Director James DeMonaco gets assists from tons of past flicks, including The Strangers, Last House on the Left, and Funny Games, but the sick ideas about America blasted underneath the familiarities sure do heat things up. Part of you wonders if a greater movie could be made if the cameras went outside into the night of violence (especially through the eyes of the Bloody Stranger), so it’s a testament to this film’s restrictions that it gets your imagination working overtime.
The Purge is filled to the brim with so many troubling thoughts about society that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it inspire hundreds of analytical blog posts, or maybe even a few college papers. Of course, the film’s most immediate and alarming idea is that the American people’s worst impulses would need to be filtered, not eradicated, in order for the country to improve. And if our darkest recesses were allowed to come out and play for the night, then minorities and the poor would probably be at the top of the casualties list, an observation that’s felt through the Polite Stranger’s obsessive need to kill a homeless black “swine.” Since rich white people would obviously have the best chances of survival, you would think they would form a community of teamwork and charity to help each other out, but one of The Purge’s more disturbing insights reveals that rich people’s egotism and resentments would cause them to turn on each other, providing a chilling theory on why this country is dealing with so many problems in the first place. All these collective thoughts make us ponder that keeping the entire movie confined to a house isn’t just a money-saving gambit, but also represents how most of the audience would realistically deal with a purge: by rigorously defending their own turf while turning a blind eye to the chaos outside their door.
As all-American types who contais a reservoir of scrappiness and moral conflict, the main cast acquits themselves rather nicely. While their increasingly stupid behavior is undoubtedly the worst thing about the movie, both Max Burkholder and Adelaide Kane embody everyday, jittery teenagers convincingly. Lena Headley takes a seemingly thankless role and proves that she can be one of the most resourceful and sexiest of suburban housewives. Rhys Wakefield is wonderfully mannered as a white-bread psychopath, making you wonder if he studied The Joker or Patrick Bateman more for his performance. And of course, it’s always fun to watch Ethan Hawke bring his dedicated thespian skills to a Hollywood product. Hawke is a pleasure to watch in material like this thanks to his duck-to-water understanding that generic fluff can inspire just as many interesting performances as indie arthouse flicks. He makes for a fine avatar through this horror ride, especially in a scene where he shows dazzling true grit pounding away on two violent intruders who’ve found their way into his home. Since Hollywood will eventually remake everything one day, and the Rambo series will undoubtedly be on the menu, Ethan Hawke gets my unapologetic vote to play the super-soldier.
While it’s typical of horror films to inspire a long, tiresome series of watered-down sequels, I actually think The Purge has enough material here to inspire more thoughtful and epic chapters. Perhaps for the next go around, the story can go out into the world for a future year’s purge, and we can witness firsthand the vast landscape of massive bloodshed and startling mayhem. There’s so many ideological sparks in this film alone that the possibilities for future sequels are endless. For if the filmmakers keep things brainier as opposed to indulgent, then The Purge has quite the potential to grow into one of the most significant and terrifying horror franchises we’ve ever had.
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