The First Purge (2018)

This fourth entry in the Purge cycle arrives as a prequel, which is to say the franchise has now traveled backward to explain the experiment that started it all. The setting is Staten Island, the guinea pig is a poor community, and the New Founding Fathers are quite open about wanting the experiment to produce corpses. Gerard McMurray directs with a straight face and a firm grip on the obvious. The casting is the film's most confident gesture: a predominantly Black ensemble anchors a studio horror picture, and the narrative treats their neighborhood as a place worth defending, not a backdrop for somebody else's redemption.

The screenplay does not whisper its politics. Arlo Sabian explains, in a boardroom, that the Purge is a fiscal instrument for eliminating the underclass and sparing the state the cost of social programs. It is a monologue delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and the film seems to regard this as a feature. Dr. Updale exists to object and then be disposed of, which is the picture's way of saying that institutional dissent is a temporary condition. Nya organizes, survives, and throws the explosive, so the feminist credentials are present but subordinate to the racial and economic argument that drives every scene.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. No LGBTQ presence, no environmental concern, no body-image discourse, no rewriting of actual history. Skeletor, the drug-addled lunatic who lurches through the margins, is a caricature that would make a sensitivity reader reach for the smelling salts, though the film never pauses to consider it. The remainder is a genre picture that states its thesis loudly and then lets the mercenaries do the arguing. It is a blunt instrument, and it knows it. We can respect the honesty while observing that subtlety was never on the call sheet.