As a movie enthusiast, I regularly find myself lying on the couch scrolling through Netflix.

Lately, I’ve grown this habit of watching terrible movies. I’ll be honest, it’s not exactly something I’ve been doing only recently, but I always feel that the films that people throw away have bits and pieces that are actually praiseworthy. So every now and then, I’ll end up watching a horribly made film, but the pleasure really lies in noticing the little good they may have in them.

Last week, I watched the film “The Purge” from 2013. It is a shame that such a unique plot makes the list of ‘bits and pieces’ cinema, but its own strengths are its own weaknesses.

Purge, according to the dictionary, refers to the act of getting rid. Set in 2022, it shows a dystopian America, where crimes are at an all-time low.

Why?

Because this party called the “New Founding Fathers of America” or the NFFA took over power and created a social experiment called “The Purge”. Every year, for 12 hours, all crime was legal. The idea of this experiment, as told in the film, was to have a collective catharsis, so that people would not resort to crime on other days. Unemployment is also 1%, and the film emphasises how this is a nation reborn.

The good

To begin, I have not watched any of the sequels.

In the context of 2013, the concept is quite unique yet simple. It immediately kickstarts a set of arguments in the viewer’s minds. For one year, all crime is legal. It’s entertaining to debate how legality and morality interact with one another, and if humans are inherently good or bad. There are scenes that also imply the racial and economic stratifications in its world, which blend well with the entire screenplay. The notion that masked people in suits are the ones purging, while the homeless are running around, shows that it is not a societal catharsis, but a rather privileged one.

Rhys Wakefield’s role as the leader of the Purgers is what holds the entire film together. I remember seeing this post on Instagram once, where two skulls were shown side by side. The cartoon skull on the left had red glowing eyes and was smiling. The other one had absolutely no emotions, and no red glowing eyes either. Almost all people in the comments agreed that the emotionless one was the scarier one. What many horror films get wrong is the understanding of what is actually scary. Simply adding ‘noise’ to the film does not make it scary.

The presentation of Wakefield as a polite young man, requesting you to send out the man stuck in your house so that he can kill the man, is a proper display of what horror should be like. The juxtaposition between the manners and the killing creates an eerie feeling. The eeriness is amplified further through the use of high-angle cameras, which create this sense of being trapped.

The plot twist in the end works well, with the neighbours saving the Sandins, just so they could purge themselves. It plays into the premise that the night allows everyone to free themselves, and the neighbours do exactly that as they are quite jealous of the Sandins. The runtime is short, which helps. (I’ll tell you later why.)

The bad

The film bites more than it can chew. The execution is bland, with most scenes feeling stereotypical. The choreography of the action is quite predictable. Talk about a bigger cliché scene than one where the hero’s daughter is about to be killed, only for the hero to save her by arriving at the last second. This happens about 3 times, once by each member of the family and a 4th time by the stranger in their house. The hide and seek essentially follows the pattern of “I’m almost caught, no, you’re not!” The blandness of the set pieces makes one feel that the short runtime is a blessing.

The entire film happens mostly inside the house, and the house’s spatial description is rather poor. It looks claustrophobically small at times, but huge during others. The stranger hides better in the Sandin residence than the Sandins themselves, showing how enormous the house is. But then the Sandins get cornered in a small end where the group and the neighbours show up together, making it look like a tent. Much of the tension in the film is generic, done by the use of loud sounds. The short runtime is the cause for both these issues, as both the house and the tension need time to be felt better.

More importantly, the plot is full of holes. Why are people purchasing a security system for 12 hours of Purge, when they can simply move out of the country or town for the night? How does it happen that one night of crime removes a year of crime? The movie never explains any of this.

The ugly

The notion that the Purge is a necessity and results in a socioeconomically stronger America is stupid. The divide of class, within the neighbourhood itself and beyond, is intensified further through the Purge. The rich elite in the film purge out the poor, which is essentially a policy sanctioned by the state to eliminate poverty, but the claims that the ‘nation is reborn’ or that unemployment is at an all-time low are baseless. One has to look deeper into the statistics to realise that unemployment is low, because the state is simply killing them.

Throughout the film, the Sandins are portrayed as the beacon of morality, where they constantly claim that they are anti-Purge and do not feel the need to participate. However, how anti-Purge are you when your entire wealth is based on selling security systems for the Purge? James Sandin knows that his systems are not foolproof, yet continues to profit from the fear of the Purge by selling these vulnerable systems.

The ending is a bit too soft, given how brutal the premise is. Your husband died, then the neighbours tried to kill you, yet you’re sitting at the same table as them at sunrise. It’s a bit too saintly.

All in all, the film fails to take the clever plot to a new level, but has bits and pieces that work well. I’d rate it at 6.5/10.