Well-crafted thrills with a topical edge
★★★★★ Dir Gerard Mcmurray
Starring Y’lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade, Marisa Tomei, Patch Darragh, Luna Lauren Velez, Kristen Solis, Rotimi Paul
Every American zeitgeist gets a horror film tailormade for it, and no franchise has stepped up to meet the Trumpian present more eagerly than The Purge. The first instalment, a modest home-invasion thriller, actually arrived before its moment, in Obama-era 2013. But its underlying premise – a populist US government legalises all crime, including murder, for one night a year – struck a chord with an audience that was fast en route to its own perpetual national feud.
The sociological underpinning of the film’s conceit was fuzzy: something to do with thinning out the underclass while goosing the stock market. But it was successful enough to merit a bigger-budget (and significantly better) sequel, which was followed by part three, subtitled Election Year and released in the heat of the 2016 presidential race. That film featured a principled, Left-wing female presidential candidate who was hunted by her egotistical, fingerwaggling rival and his fascist goon squad. You’ll never guess who won.
Anyway. One real-world Donald Trump inauguration later, here is The First Purge: a table-setting prequel in which the recently elected (and now explicitly Nra-backed) New Founding Fathers of America party test-drive their plan for an annual night of chaos. The pilot study is carried out in the New York borough of Staten Island, where the predominantly black and Hispanic residents are plied with $5,000 per head to stay put for the duration, with the promise of more if they become active participants.
Takers include Dmitri (Y’lan Noel), a local cocaine kingpin who has to hang around to guard his stash, Isaiah (south London-born Joivan Wade), one of Dmitri’s junior sales staff who’s seeking revenge on a violent addict (Rotimi Paul), and Nya (Lex Scott Davis), Isaiah’s older sister and an anti-purge activist who plans to spend the night looking after vulnerable neighbours in her local church. Meanwhile, in the usual glass-panelled eyrie, the psychologist who helped hatch the scheme (Marisa Tomei) is confounded when the violence doesn’t quickly burn out, per her predictions – but builds to all-out urban warfare. She is even afforded a plaintive “What have I done?” moment: a bit rich, you might think, considering the answer is “legalise murder”. But the boroughwide meltdown turns out to be the result of shadowy state manipulation, rather than the innate barbarity of the non-white working class.
In the scramble for topicality, The First Purge plants its thumb on every hot button in sight. Director Gerard Mcmurray co-opts imagery from Black Lives Matter protests, Ku Klux Klan patrols, police brutality videos and the Tiki-torch-brandishing white-collar racists of Charlottesville, while writer and series creator James Demonaco’s screenplay factors in Make-americagreat-again bombast and the spectre of foreign interference. (“F---in’ Russians? Something funky’s going down, dude,” one of Dmitri’s wingmen observes, when a Slavic voice gurgles from a walkie-talkie.) These appropriations pack a punch that never feels cheap – the film has the trick down pat of chilling you with a semi-recognisable haunting image or jab of inflammatory rhetoric. But it lacks the patience to craft a persuasive conspiracy. The secret plan here is no more complex than rich people goading poor people into killing each other: the opportunity for a meaty trash-cinema take on the consolidation of power under the guise of populism, or the self-cannibalising lunacy of a grab-what-you-can culture, goes disappointingly un-seized.
Yet there are still well-crafted popcorn thrills. The First Purge is as visually hair-raising as its predecessors, with the usual range of inventively horrible masks worn by the Purgers (the costume designer is Amela Baksic), and a brilliantly achieved transition from a hard-edged, social-realist visual style in the film’s opening act to the overtly John Carpenter-esque gloss and throb of Purge Night itself. And in Noel, Wade and Davis, Mcmurray has found three relative unknowns with enough natural star power to mitigate the need for an Ethan Hawke, Frank Grillo or Carmen Ejogo this time around. The brawny, brooding Noel in particular feels like a marquee name in waiting, and he deserves an opportunity to flex his action chops elsewhere before the inevitable
Purge 5: Subtitle TBC Pending Second Term and/or Impeachment.