Everardo Valerio Gout’s anti-racist horror film “The Forever Purge” has been overtaken by reality.
Nothing in America is creepier than Donald Trump’s legacy: an elusive, anti-democratic movement that left a horror film out of reality in the images of the storming of the Capitol. Nobody knows what atrocities will follow. As is so often the case when something nightmarish happens, you thought you had seen something like that in the cinema before.
For example in the “Purge” series by James DeMonaco: Your plot is simple. Once a year all laws in America are suspended for twelve hours. Politics always played a role in these hidden object scenes of blind rage. In the first part, the American film critic David Thompson discovered echoes of the social satires of Samuel Fuller, Luis Buñuel and Michael Haneke. The second part, “Election Year”, was released in theaters during the first Trump election campaign. But the violence always came from all political directions, if at all it claimed any motivation for itself.
A deep black apocalypse
It is different now. “The Forever Purge”, a stylistically independent work by filmmaker Everardo Valerio Gout based on a screenplay by DeMonaco, is a deep black apocalypse about unleashed racism in the near future. It starts with Juan and Adela fleeing the gang crime in Mexico illegally entering the United States. Behind the border wall, the couple expects a country that is now ruled by the “New Founding Fathers of America”.
The ultra-right party is a filmmaker’s fantasy, but like so much here so close to reality that it is better to look up again to see if there isn’t a movement with this name already. Even if the film is set in 2048, Texas will look like it does today.
Juan finds work on a farm run by a conservative but constitutional patriarch. Will Patton plays some kind of Clint Eastwood Republican – anti-racist and with his heart in the right place. He remains a lonely and exceptional figure, a relic from a bygone era.
Even his son Dylan barely hides his racism against the new employee, who is visibly better at handling horses. Nevertheless, he and his pregnant wife will soon have to pull themselves together with Juan and Adela – on the run from an unleashed mob. The new government has reintroduced the “purge”, which means something like “cleansing” – those who do not count themselves as part of the racist lynch mob become fair game.
But after twelve hours the spook is not over. Media reports of an “eternal purge”, which had been proclaimed by ultra-right groups. Canada and Mexico open their borders to fugitive US citizens in an act of grace, but only for six hours. The chaos is inevitable.
A Christoph Schlingensief could not have imagined the bitter irony of this knife-sharpening farce better – hundreds of thousands of Americans rush to Mexico as refugees. Messages like “What will become of the unaccompanied US refugee children” dominate the news. Of course, this is still an exploitation movie, but at no point does the film curry favor with the conservative part of its target group. A back door that could make the film useful for a racist audience as a gain in pleasure cannot be made out.
The topicality of this dystopia is all the more striking as the film was completed before the excesses after Trump’s election defeat. A theatrical release was originally planned for July 2020, which was postponed due to the corona pandemic.
There was a terrible clash between film and real violence on July 26, 2021 in the Californian city of Corona: During a midnight performance, a shooter murdered a 19-year-old social media star and his girlfriend. Even if this act of violence has nothing to do with the film and it should not have motivated the act, a sad shadow remains. This event, too, is now part of the history of a film’s impact – caught up in reality, which it addresses using the means of genre cinema.
The Forever Purge. USA 2021. Regie: Everardo Valerio Gout. 103 Min.
