The Purge: Election Year [Review by SpecialK]

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In a summer punctuated by shooting deaths at the hands of police, targeted murderous attacks on officers, hate-filled rampages in public places ranging from dance clubs to malls to vigils, and presidential candidates dueling it out in the headlines with starkly different proposals to stop the madness, I am more eager than ever to find a solid horror film to take my mind off of it all, if only for a few hours.

The Purge: Election Year has all the ingredients necessary to deliver the most extreme escape from reality: hyperbolic dystopia, over-the-top violence, satisfying applause-worthy heroes, and just enough hat-tips to current events to earn a chuckle here and there. But perhaps unfortunately, even creator James DeMonaco didn’t anticipate just how closely his film would hew to the truth.

The story begins as a not-too-distant future United States prepares for a presidential election, which is shortly to follow the annual “purge” – a 12-hour period when all crimes are legal, and when lifelong criminals and prosaic homemakers alike take to the streets to seek revenge for past purges, settle long-held grudges, or simply to wreak havoc while it’s legal. The election’s establishment candidate strongly believes that the annual practice showcased in the first two films (The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy) keeps the peace for the rest of the 364.5 days of the year. Meanwhile the challenger, Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell), who lost her own family to the purge years ago, and who vows to end the ritual, sees the practice as the government’s cruel and hateful way to cap homelessness and poverty and to keep Americans cowering in fear.

Like its predecessors, the film focuses on purge night. Headstrong Senator Roan insists on waiting out the purge in her house, guaranteeing a long night for her security detail, led by Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo), who resisted his own urge to purge in the last film.  Parallel plotlines offer less high-profile heroes like store owner and community foster dad Joe Dixon (Mykelti Williamson), who is unable to afford the spike in his purge insurance on the eve of the big night, and decides to defend his own store with his American-dream-building Mexican immigrant coworker at his side. We also meet the leaders of an underground resistance movement that prefers not to leave the fate of the country up to the electorate, and plots to use the cover of purge night to enact its own fierce revenge against the political establishment.

Predictably tracking the prior films, betrayal and brute force breach even the tightest of security, and our main characters spill onto the streets of the nation’s capital, crossing each other’s paths and often saving each other’s lives in the nick of time as they struggle to survive.

Perhaps because DeMonaco wrote and directed The Purge: Election Year, just like the two prior films, it delivers in many ways a truly violent horror film should.  It showcases poetic and vexing imagery of innocence turned homicidal, adds just a touch of humor (albeit a bit exploitative at times—DeMonaco could learn a thing or two from Jesse Williams’ speech highlighting cultural expropriation at the BET Awards), and perhaps most disturbingly, offers a window into just how quickly human nature would succumb to its demons if our social mores gently stepped aside for a moment.

But what would normally result in a relatively tepid review (something akin to “provides the gory horror you may desire but I prefer to skip”) becomes something much more as I sit through a film that provides a terrifyingly accurate depiction of our very own election year.

Yes of course, we don’t have a purge, and no, I’m not trying to turn this review into clickbait by delving into a political rant. But for the first time in my entire life, I am struck by how very closely the tenor of our nation’s reality tracks a film of abject horror.

We see a palpable struggle between rich and poor, an election that promises to shape the future of the country, and outbursts of violence when frustrations and despair erupt. Plus, there’s the presidential candidate hero (whether you see her as a liberal female senator who urges peace, or as an antiestablishment candidate demanding change).

But what rises above it all and roils my gut as I watch the film is the terrifyingly real message of the power of fear, and how quickly it can lead a nation down a path of destruction. Build a wall? “Gotta stop ’em somehow.” Register all Muslims? “Well, if you have nothing to hide…” Organize an annual event to cleanse all those ugly thoughts out of our system? Maybe it’s not as impossible as we’d like to think.

I doubt DeMonaco envisioned his film would ring quite so true. But then again, last year, I’d never have envisioned that a woman in our nation’s capital would dump out her drink onto a woman in a hijab sitting outside of a coffee shop while calling her a “Muslim piece of trash,” or that two brothers in Massachusetts would severely beat a homeless man with a metal pipe because they believed him to be an immigrant—all while spewing the name of a hate-fueled presidential candidate. After all, perhaps Hannah Arendt never imagined she’d grow up to write a book about the story of a paper pusher who was made to organize the extermination of an entire people.  When you think about it, is there much out there that’s more bone-chillingly terrifying than the pure banality of evil?

And so while we can pretend that the most awful of horror movies are entertainment because they could never truly come to life, and while we might find safety and comfort in pretending that decent people would never allow that to happen, we absolutely must continue to ask ourselves if we are only in fact pretending. And then we must do absolutely everything we can to keep these horrors on the silver screen and out of our communities.

Any other year? The Purge: Election Year would be a terrifyingly violent escape from the boring stresses of daily life. In 2016? It’s an acute warning of the banality of evil that hits a bit too close to home for comfort.

SpecialK Verdict: See it. Then vote your conscience.

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