The use of the constant rain and the flooding of the area as thematic elements never gets heavy-handed and enhances the beauty of the landscape rising up around these characters.
This time around, most of the creative teams just focused on figuring out how to get a first person perspective and then forgot to give us an interesting story.
The film's narrative itself slowly adopts a hallucinogenic style, with long silences, slow-motion sequences, mind-bending fast-cut psychedelic imagery and then suddenly the medium becomes the message.
Peter Strickland has crafted a love letter to cinema itself, specifically to the Italian giallo cinema of the 70s -- the world of Argento, Bava, Fulci, and more.
All in all, The Purge is a problematic film, wearing its politics on its sleeve and embracing nearly every cliché imaginable with the standard home invasion scenario.
This is a darkly fascinating and original story that doesn’t end well for anyone involved, but it has a lot of heart. It's good to see Jen and Sylvia Soska get a break and keep moving upward and onward.
But in the process of the film, each of the main characters either can't restrain themselves from murdering humans, do it in a dream state, or otherwise give in to their passionate animal side. And then everybody feels bad.
