What if homicide is perfectly legal for one night a year? This question is the starting point of the horror series “The Purge”. And this time the bloodshed is taking longer than planned.
Berlin – There are scenes as you imagine them from war zones: Burning districts, corpses on the streets, blood-smeared walls and garage doors.
The image of the USA drawn in the horror film “The Forever Purge” is full of murderous patriots who want to free their country from the unloved migrants from Mexico with merciless vigilante justice – and thus wreak havoc across the country. Now the socially critical horror flick is coming to German cinemas.
“The Forever Purge” is the fifth part of a horror series that has now become a cult following, which is based on a chilling basic vision: In an America of the near future there is exactly one night a year in which everything is allowed, including murder and other crimes .
While the previous films, which came to cinemas between 2013 and 2018, began their state-organized orgies of violence punctually at 7:00 p.m. and ended at 7:00 a.m., as the government of the “New Founding Fathers of America” (New Founding Fathers of America, for short : NFFA), everything is different this time.
But one after anonther. The film starts with the Mexican couple Juan and Adela, who are fleeing the drug cartels in their homeland and who immigrate illegally to America. Less than a year later, Juan works on the ranch of the wealthy Tucker family, while Adela makes a living in a business.
All safe?
On the evening of the “purge”, a bus takes them to a fenced and protected mass shelter for migrants. Here they spend the night until the haunted outside is over. Meanwhile, the Tucker family barricades themselves in their property and transforms their house into a high-tech security wing at the push of a button.
The next morning, when the gates of the accommodation open, it looks like the purge is over. But after a short time it turns out that the killing continues: The armed vigilante group “The Forever Purge” has taken control of the country and wants to make the chaos of the purge night permanent.
Both Juan and Adela and the Tuckers now have to fight for bare survival. They join forces and begin a life-threatening journey to the Mexican border, where a gigantic sheet metal avalanche with American refugees is already clogging the border stations.
More than a crude orgy of violence
“The Forever Purge” clearly wants to be more than just a crude orgy of violence for die-hard horror fans: References to the Trump era are almost blatantly emphasized here and there, and the film also brings viewers to the difficult relationship many Americans have with the issues of migration and flight closer in his very own way.
Some scenes are very reminiscent of the images of the rampaging Trump supporters who stormed Congress in Washington in early January. The amazing thing about it: The film was made before what happened at the time. But director Everardo Gout goes even further and lets his racist lynch mob go off on migrants and the wealthy, while loudspeaker announcements from armored citizens’ militia buses praise the “right” Americans.
And this is exactly where the rabbit is in the pepper: The well-intentioned, but often one-dimensional social criticism is drowned in the many action scenes between burning houses and bloody street battles. Gout relies less on a differentiated depiction of the complex political reality in America, and more on expressive images – for example when he shows the American Nazi as an animal muscle bundle with a bald head and a swastika tattoo on his face.
Friends of the series should still get their money’s worth, or perhaps because of it. Because visually the strip has a lot to offer. The plan sequences through burning city districts, for example, are strong, pulling the audience right into the middle of the apocalyptic events and holding them in suspense for minutes without cutting. Genre-typical shock effects are also not neglected: the viewer always has to be prepared for a fatal danger suddenly jumping out of the darkness.
Overall, the around 100-minute strip offers a solid piece of horror entertainment, whose finger pointing to Trump America in the midst of explosions and gunfire occasionally fades into the background.
The Forever Purge, FSK 16, 103 minutes, by Everardo Gout, with Ana de la Reguera, Tenoch Huerta, Leven Rambin, Susie Abromeit, Joshua Dov, Gregory Zaragoza and Josh Lucas dpa
