The Purge

Baby it’s cold outside.

Extrapolated a few degrees sideways into a parallel future, America has undergone some kind of reboot. The ‘new founding fathers’ have reclaimed the night for freedom, the expression of which is an annual holiday where law and order are suspended for a 12 hour period and the citizenry are charged with completing a bloody social-darwinist cleansing project. Freedom means the well armed rich take to the streets to slaughter the poorly fortified poor, or anyone else who annoys them.

The plot is held together by a regimen of improbability and its characters making illogical or undermotivated decisions. Nevertheless the simple premise yields a depth of repercussions and makes for a telling contemporary theme of society fracturing on the basis of nothing more than neighbourly greed.