The Purge was a sickly-sweet anticapitalist treat. A contemporary update of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” folded into the home-invasion genre, the film follows the efforts of the affluent Sandin family to keep alive on the night of a government-sanctioned slaughter.

It’s 2022, we’re told in the opening credits, and the traditionalist New Founding Fathers regime has solved pernicious social ills like unemployment, crime, and poverty by instituting an annual holiday known as “the Purge,” during which law enforcement is suspended for twelve hours, and citizens are free to expunge their baser desires through offing each other.

The annual melee has been credited with fixing society’s problems. Yet — as the radio and TV pundits that pepper the beginning of the film helpfully remind us — because a rigid class structure continues to exist in this dystopia, only those able to afford security benefit from such a service. The pressure-valve function of the Purge exists at the expense of society’s poorest and most vulnerable, who are summarily hunted down and executed for the satisfaction of the rich.