Pure: Pffft Goes The Dynamite

I think it’s important that the arts be able to engage with difficult, uncomfortable ideas, and horror’s no different. Fictional fears can be proxies for real-world ones, sure, and in that mode horror provides a measure of distance, of emotional safety. We can work our shit out without it getting too close, too real. But when real-world fears take the lead and fictional fears are no longer a proxy, but instead a way to heighten those real-world fears, that’s when it gets interesting. When it gets under our skin and we don’t have the comfort of distance. The horror is right here beside us and there’s no use pretending otherwise.

But this is a tricky, tricky balance. It’s easy to mishandle sensitive subject matter, to take the sort of actual horrors people contend with every day and trivialize them as cheap provocation, or worse. (See, for example, roughly 95% of all horror films that feature rape in some form or another.) Dealing with controversial or sensitive subject matter in creative works is like juggling dynamite: It can be done, but you better be goddamn good at juggling.

The people who made Pure are not good at juggling, and end up squandering a potentially powerful story on trite expressions of its central ideas and a raftload of cheap jump scares.

We open on a young woman riding along in a car, eyes closed. She’s dreaming, the kind of reverie you experience on long road trips. Her dream is  unsettling - in it, she walks through a field in a white dress reminiscent of a wedding dress, her face obscured by a veil, and she meets a contorted, twisted mirror image in a black dress, crawling along the ground. It’s actually pretty sinister, and the cross-cutting between her riding peacefully in the car and the dream creates some real tension…

…and then the veils come off, and the one in black smiles in an obviously CG-exaggerated grin. Its artificiality robs the moment of all its power. We aren’t watching a nightmare, we’re watching a special effect.

(As an aside, this is pretty much the movie in a nutshell - there’s the potential for something grim and unsettling here, but it’s undone by cheap, obvious choices throughout.)

The car ride ends with the young woman getting out of the car and getting noisily sick. She is Shay, and she’s come with her half-sister Jo and their father, Kyle to an annual father-daughter “purity retreat” out in the woods. Kyle subscribes to a particular view of Christianity that positions fathers as the keepers of their daughters’ “purity”(read, sexual virginity) ahead of marriage, and for some time, Kyle and Jo have attended these retreats to reaffirm this specific father-daughter relationship at the “purity ball” and subsequent signing of a contract between father and daughter that concludes the retreat. Shay is Kyle’s daughter by another woman, and the recent death of Shay’s mother has brought her back into Kyle’s life. Shay is happy to finally have a father in her life, and Kyle gets another chance to get it right, so Shay’s trying her best to go along. Jo’s very much the bad girl - you can tell because she smokes and wears makeup and flannel shirts and jeans instead of pretty feminine dresses like all the other daughters.

The retreat is run by Pastor Seth, who is very much the consumer-grade Christian pastor, all business casual and bland performative informality, a slick megachurch version of faith. Lots of smiles and glad-handing, all with a gun on his hip. Nobody comments on the gun. Pastor Seth opens the retreat with a sermon about Lilith, the first woman created by God, exiled to Hell for consorting with the heavenly host. Pastor Seth really doesn’t like it when women don’t respect the wishes of men. No he does not.

The daughters are assigned to cabins, and Jo’s exasperated that Lacey - Seth’s daughter - is sharing their cabin as well. Lacey’s a goody-two-shoes sure to snitch on any fun that bad-girl Jo might want to have. Rounding out the cabin is Kellyann, who is sweet, sincere in her relationship with God, diligent about counting her calories and going for a run every morning, just like her daddy wants her to. Kellyann takes a non-specified medicine for anxiety. It’s tough being daddy’s little girl. Sure enough, night falls and the girls of Cabin 4 get into a little trouble, passing a vape pen back and forth while Lacey looks on disapprovingly.

And then Jo suggests they sneak off into the woods for a little adventure. See, Jo found a book about Lilith in their cabin a few years back and she’s been reading it. She thinks Lilith is misunderstood, and she ropes the girls into trying a little ritual she found in the book. It’s all for laughs, it never works. Only Shay notices something is missing from the ritual, and once it’s made complete, extinguished candles flare back into life.

And Shay sees the figure from her dream.

What follows is sort of two movies happening at the same time. On the one hand, you have the quietly but persistently sinister atmosphere of the purity ball, and on the other you have Shay hallucinating this menacing figure, like they really did summon some kind of spirit during the ritual, and ultimately, these two films are at odds. See, purity balls are already really, really creepy, in the way that fathers positioning themselves as the gatekeeper of their daughter’s sexuality (and ultimately, their agency) through rituals that approximate marriage can be. And, like, that’s not an invention of the film. Those things really exist. But the filmmakers don’t trust this to carry the horror of the film, and so instead try to make it an evil-spirit story as well. People like Pastor Seth and people who follow him are, in their way, monstrous. You don’t need another monster - especially one that isn’t that scary.

And that’s the other problem with this film - neither of the two movies it’s trying to be are well-served by the filmmakers. This is a deeply obvious film - everything is spelled out for us in the most simplistic terms possible. The characters are all painted with the broadest possible brush - the fathers and the pastor are all creepy, controlling hypocrites with double standards big enough to park an aircraft carrier in, the daughters (at least, the four on which the film focuses) are less people than specific types - Shay is shy and awkward, Jo is the rebellious bad girl, Lacey is the goody-goody who buys into the whole thing, and Kellyann is a believer breaking under the strain of unrealistic demands. Films like Antichrist and The VVitch have dealt far more vividly and effectively in the idea of pagan, primal female energy as a response to patriarchal control, and it’s clear (exposited by Jo early on) that Lilith is intended to be an icon of empowerment here, which makes it weird that for most of the film her role is that of jump-scare engine, like the girls conjured Bloody Mary during a sleepover. Nobody really talks to each other, they just say things for the benefit of the viewer, and there’s no nuance at all. Everything and everyone is largely what they appear to be (at least, until the very end, where there are some last-minute surprises and betrayals that actually more or less work well).

On top of that, everything’s a little too convenient - Pastor Seth  goes on and on about Lilith so that we know who the mysterious figure is going to be, and Jo just happened to find a book about her in their cabin one year (which makes no fucking sense - is someone as obsessed with control over women as Seth really going to let a book like that hang around?), and she’s been trying this ritual over and over, but Shay just happens to know how to fill in the missing pieces of the ritual for...reasons? Nobody once in all these years has ratted on Jo for her bad behavior? It’s hard to make a film about authoritarian control when that oppressiveness comes and goes as needed for plot reasons.

And on top of that, this isn’t a film with a lot of teeth to it. The ritual is pretty half-assed (but A Dark Song has probably ruined me for portrayals of ritual in any other film). Shay starts hallucinating all kinds of things - she sees Lilith everywhere and starts seeing all of the fathers and the pastor as vaguely demonic figures (which again, no shit, movie), then there’s some vaguely sinister intimations about what happens to recalcitrant daughters and Pastor Seth’s one-on-one “prayer sessions,” but it just kind of goes on like this until everything comes to a head. There’s not a lot of tension or surprise (apart from sudden Lilith appearances scored to loud music stings, which are just the cinematic equivalent of going BOO!) or real visceral emotional stakes at all. The idea of a bunch of dads alone with their underage daughters in the woods, utterly convinced of the righteousness of whatever they do? That could be genuinely horrifying, but this film doesn’t trust that or have the courage to really lean into the oppressive fear that would encourage, to really go there. Instead it makes the dads two-dimensional villains, and the daughters two-dimensional heroes whose summoned spirit helps them get revenge. The production values, casting, acting, and mood top out at “CW teen drama,” so the net result pretty much ends up as a slightly gorier episode of Riverdale, and a lot tamer than that show in some ways.

There are isolated moments that are really effective here and there - the sinister gathering of fathers and pastor behind closed doors, Lacey’s complete breakdown over having kissed a boy, flashes of real rage and vivid imagery at the climax, but it’s not enough. The way men conspire to exert control over women and justify that control as their right is a very real horror that affects millions, and so to turn it into the pretext for a tame, crummy avenging-spirit story is worse than disappointing - it’s frustrating. They had something set to explode, and they fumbled it.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu