The Purge

The Purge

Writer and Director ~ James DeMonaco

2013, USA-France

Stars ~ Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Max Burkholder, Adelaide Kane

Where for one night of the year, people get to cosplay as the villains they see in films and television and the one fundamental American desire seems to be to vengefully murder. They become psychopaths.  You can join a gang, skip and piggyback down the hallways of victims in masks and give ironical and vacuous villainous speeches to your targets. It’s a beguiling dystopian conceit, good for a B-movie that is all about the educated and the upper class and the profiteers eating themselves from the inside out, from the outside in.

And the kid’s mobile camera – surely inspired by ‘Toy Story’ Sid’s artistry - does promote chuckles of oh, I wonder if that’s come in handy later? I can allow for the logic of the boy letting in someone he sees as in mortal danger – the whole point is his empathy – where many see a lot of Horror Characters Doing Dumb Things. But it does have a couple of subtler points that gesture at wider themes and backstory, such as the assassination attempt and Sandin’s (Ethan Hawke) evident awareness of his sham sales. Lena Headley can convey a whole marriage of doubts with small reactions and silences.

It works as satire, although it probably doesn’t stand scrutiny if you start to squint. You can play your own game of What If?  For example, lawlessness permitted for a night: crossing the border? Abortion? Digital crime? If all the managers are murdered – assuming the bosses know to keep well away – shops looted, offices torched, the effect on business and economy, not to mention the clean-up, would surely not be worth the state cost (would a government accept national financial responsibility)? Would an annually disrupted economy just lead to more unemployment and to the homeless that must be purged? But stepping aside the other various possibilities, it’s murder the film is most interested in, and with American gun culture where “freedom” seems to mean to be able to shoot those who annoy you without consequence, and that seems to be the foundation. So I would quibble with Allan Almachar’s indictment that it’s “An ugly, vile, and miserable film that essentially argues that all humans are evil.” [The MacGuffin, Jul 24, 2020], because the film stamps down that it’s a specifically American Gun and Revenge Culture context. Even Trump threw up the concept of a “purge” like proposal in rambling (although comments pointed out that it wasmore akin to “Krystalnacht”): it’s an idea with lots of vengeance appeal.  And isn’t premeditation still a crime?

If nothing else, it adds to the list of Home Invasion movies that warn that educated twentysomethings are just cosplaying psychopaths. Of course, this could all be avoided if they just went on holiday for the night, but that’s part of the point: it’s Ethan Hawke’s arrogance that they’ll be just fine in this neighbourhood, as long as they don’t care and shutter up, unaware that he’s deluding himself.

It's never more than it’s tropes: a home invasion B-movie with high concept pretentions. It even does the fridge door gag. But it’s enjoyable B-movie fare with enough to distinguish it and to capture the imagination. At least to go on for a franchise and a TV series.

 

 

The Purge: Anarchy

Writer & Director ~ James DeMonaco

2014, USA

Stars ~ Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Zach Gilford

Without a veneer of respectability given by prestige lead actors of the original, this sequel is even more pulpy and less thoughtful. This time with a bigger budget and out on the streets, the vision of a society in grip of murder-mania is even more garish yet less obviously critical as it gives way to action lunkheadedness. The street gangs are just a Purge or two away from going full ‘Mad Max: Road Warrior’. And again, there’s the sense that the film is gesturing criticism whilst revelling in genre debauchery. It just loves cool-posing its psycho-civilians too much. Like a less portentous ‘Civil War’ with class divides still dictating allegiances and agendas, as a stepping outside from the original, it’s entertaining if you don’t prod too much.  

 

Nosferatu

Nosferatu

Director ~ Robert Eggers

Writers ~ Robert Eggers, Henrik Galeen, Bram Stoker

2024, United States - United Kingdom -Hungary

Stars ~ Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Willem Defoe,

Aaron Taylor-Johnson

 

And with the greyscale and cinematography of the first few minutes, I was hooked, wondering if it would continue. And it does: Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is exceptional, and the layers, the depths of the darkness and shadowplay captured are stunning. (The shot of the forest crossroads early on is a favourite.) It’s a lush and gorgeous-looking film throughout, although Eggers’ visual command has never been in doubt.

 

F.W. Murnau’s 1922 original has an uncontested legend and influence as a visual horror tone poem, and so there will always be that “remaking is sacrilegious” and “Why??!!” objections, as if remaking hasn’t always in cinema’s DNA. So that aside, the criticisms I have noted are: there’s no colour; it’s boring; it’s just a ‘Dracula’ rip-off (!); and for Robin from Dark Corners, it’s laughable with bad dialogue and acting, and he’s not the only one. None of which landed with me or challenged my enjoyment and sense of being impressed. (Robin is more chastising Eggers’ film for being not the film he wanted rather than what it is, which is a starting point that rarely gets off the runway for me: his summary is that the film is bad, unnecessary and laughable. I enjoy Dark Corners, but we disagree here) 

 

The performances stand out. Nicolas Hoult is great at conveying a man out of his depth but trying to fall back on patriarchal constructs to convince himself he’s in control, especially with his wife. Willem Defoe is reliably ornate, but not as gung-ho as Simon McBurney as Knock, biting off pigeon heads and scenery with equal gusto. Lily-Rose Depp gives it her all, certainly giving Ellen Hutter an agency, with the moment where it all goes ‘The Exorcist’ both a high-point with her physical contortions and most groan-worthy when it goes all Demonic Voice.

 

Speaking of voices: Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok provides a most thick and mannered accent. Skarsgård trained to lower his voice an octave and speaks a likeness of the dead language of Duncian, and where I was left in wonder at the topography of his pronunciation, others apparently found it ridiculous. The look is daring in that Orlok looks exactly like the corpse of a period nobleman, neither as monstrous as Max Schreck – a true otherworldly nightmare that makes you wonder how he would convincingly move in the real world – or as seductive as many others. Manuel Batencourt says that “In choosing to make Count Orlok repulsive, you sap it of both the metaphorical potential and the effect you want on your audience.”, but Schreck is the yardstick here rather than Lugosi or Reeve, and the effect is to present something more probable than either: a regal strigoi, if you will. It is obsession and decay rendered here rather than temptation and ravishment and the reeking charmlessness is all to the point.

 

In performances, the hidden treat here is the impressive turn by Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding, providing as a character a touchstone to the normality under siege by the supernatural, and losing. In many ways, he does as much to carry the baggage as Depp, chapping at the bit as his domestic bliss is increasingly under siege.  

 

It is a pretty, lush film, full of nuance, a few shocks and a pleasing depth of Craig Lathrop’s set design and period detail. The altitude of Gothicism and melodrama here falls between Eggers’ meticulousness of ‘The Witch’ and the plunge-ahead romp of ‘The Northman’, a taste both sombre and ripe with hints of black humour. It’s almost as if Eggers has found the balance now to be both mainstream and true to his esotericism. A labour of love for a project that seems to have defined his career from the very start when he put on a theatre production of ‘Nosferatu’, Eggers says he saw this as a chance to tackle the weaknesses of Bram Stoker’s novel. Indeed, by the second half, it becomes not only an allegory for the pestilence and pandemics of the era but reads like the upper-class male fear of foreign seduction of English women in which the men bond almost homo-erotically to fend off immigrant brutes. By the time the novel gets to Van Helsing’s effusing about male camaraderie, any melodrama conveyed by the films are totally in situ. Eggers speaks of using this as an opportunity to accentuate female agency, and certainly his ‘Nosferatu’ is the Ellen Hutter show with Van Helsing conceding patriarchal authority to her self-sacrifice for the greater good. Also note that it is ultimately Count Orlok that comes across more as an addict.

 

All these facets are agreeable, searching explorations of the original, and if adaptions of well-worn text are to probe weaknesses and a few nuances instead of being comforting facsimiles, then ‘Nosferatu’ is a noble effort. Not least, it is full of arresting imagery and accumulating to an unforgettable final horror portrait. If it speaks to you, it’s just very enjoyable and the artistry makes it just a bit special.