Film Review: The Purge: Election Year

A dark little franchise with a bleak and upsettingly believable premise, James DeMonaco’s dystopian Purge films are getting increasingly political in nature – but does this make them more disturbing, or just more distasteful? In this third instalment, America is again partaking in its annual, government-sanctioned night of ritualised violence, where lawlessness reigns in an attempt to curb society’s depraved and murderous tendencies throughout the rest of the year. But as the title explains, it’s an election year, and change is afoot. The working class and minorities are protesting that the Purge disproportionately targets them in order to maintain white supremacy and “predatory capitalism.” Meanwhile, a Bernie-esque liberal presidential candidate (Elizabeth Mitchell) is campaigning to end the Purge forever.

DeMonaco touches on various weighty social issues – BlackLivesMatter, police brutality, American exceptionalism, drones, Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric – without fully committing to any of them. America is a power-hungry, ethical vacuum obsessed with the outdated views of the Founding Fathers – but Europeans are “murder tourists” who visit specifically to experience the Purge. The slightly muddled allegories and the film’s reluctance to show us likable characters succumbing to violence demonstrates that this potentially devastating satire pulls its punches.

One message that isn’t mixed is that violence can be bloody fun. DeMonaco is talented at creating characters and imagery that straddle the darkly comic and outright terrifying. A highlight of The Purge: Election Year is a group of rebellious teenage girls who travel in a car covered in fairy-lights, wearing pink tutu skirts as they brandish machetes. Like a sadistic hen party from hell, blasting Miley Cyrus’ ‘Party In The USA’ as they murder, the teenagers capture the spirit of The Purge: Election Year: it’s aggressive, psychologically layered, and ultimately not interested in taking its violence too seriously.