James DeMonaco’s 2013 home invasion flick introduces the eponymous policy, whereby all crime is legal for one night each year; a policy that has eradicated unemployment and poverty for reasons that are never explained. I suppose they need a lot more ambulance drivers and street cleaners?

DeMonaco has come up with a catchy high concept and not thought it through in the slightest, rendering the immediate story nonsensical and the broader implications unconscionable. Home security salesman James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) has kitted out his house with everything you could need to survive Purge Night, apart from a panic room, emergency power or doors capable of stopping intruders. It doesn’t even stop his daughter’s boyfriend from sneaking into her room.

Purge Night descends and the Sandin family seem surprised to hear gunshots, even though this happens every year. The boyfriend then tries to shoot James, which again is never explained. Meanwhile local Purge psychotics choose to spend their 12 hours of lawlessness hanging around outside the Sandin home, like neighbourhood children visiting the most gaudily decorated house at Christmas.

The plot’s disregard for basic logic is unsurprising given the wider idiocy at play here. The Purge assumes that we would all be out murdering each other at the earliest opportunity, and that all criminals are motivated by some innate desire for violence and not (for example) desperation. This deeply dispassionate worldview would be forgivable if the film was darkly funny or remotely suspenseful, but every scene ends with someone about to kill one of the main characters getting shot by the only family member who was off screen. And the tone is serious and preachy, with the audacity to lecture us about the cruelty of this stupid policy it invented.

All in all it projects a bleak vision of the year 2022, though it looks preferable to the one that gave us Prime Minister Liz Truss and the Netflix show Dated and Related.