1 out of 5

Directed by: Hannah Macpherson

Lazily, without doing any research, I will suppose that the ‘celebration’ being depicted in Into the Dark’s September entry, Pure, is real.  I’m very much not sure if the holiday of ‘Daughter’s Day’, which the wiki episode list lists as being the featured holiday for this ep, is actually aligned with purity retreats, or a purity movement, but given the oddity of the unrecognized holiday, which I’ll suppose is the one I see referenced as ‘Father-Daughter Day’ (i.e. there isn’t a ‘Father-Son’ day, or a ‘Parent-Child’ day, or whatnot), it’s fairly conflated with the mantra theme of Pure’s depicted devotees: protect your daughters!  Daddy knows best!  Wrapped into the religious sexual guilting of a ‘purity movement,’ we get a day when daughter’s sign a fucking contract to swear that they won’t fuck (or kiss, or masturbate) until marriage.  In the fiction of the film (or the reality of a purity movement), this concept is only practiced with daughters, because something something temptation is different for boys, and that’s not me trying to skimp on the explanation, but rather how the men in the movie essentially describe it.  It’s more difficult for girls – temptation is everywhere! – and so they need the strong, guiding hands of their dads.

This, by itself, is frightening fucking stuff.  In Pure, there’s the opportunity for horror, as our lead, Shay (Jahkara Smith) ends up involved in a light-as-a-feather, stiff-as-a-board-type summoning of Lillith, perhaps causing disruptive things to start occurring – crosses falling; feedback during seminars and the like.  Building up to a ‘Purity Ball’ – when those contracts are signed – there’s potential for some Carrie-ness to occur.

This would be a good horror film.  And it’s possible that that existed in the teleplay by director Hannah Macpherson, but unfortunately, there was either the requisite or mandate to add some actual ‘scares’ to the movie, which, of course, makes it laughably unscary.  Smash cuts of a ‘creepy’ Lillith with a poorly done CGI smile appear as soon as the movie starts, and keep cropping up throughout, before the summoning ritual even occurs.  A low budget makes the ‘visions’ of things Shay sees – eyes turning black, coughing up black blood – into cheap gimmicks, and the script is unable to leverage its setup into anything impactful.  To the script’s credit, it doesn’t automatically jump to the other extreme – virginity is lame; let’s all be sexually free! – by allowing one of its co-leads to express an appreciation of the movement, but not in its as-dictacted-by-men structure.  It tries to play fair by including characters along the spectrum of opinion.  But because of the focus on retreating to cheap jump scares instead of building dread, there’s no time to really develop that.  It’s hollow, and it renders the (somewhat inevitable) conclusion as equally trite.  This is all bound to a somewhat unmotivated filming style that feels like it’s going through the motions.

The ‘message’ Into the Dark entries have been some of the worst because of the need to include cliche horror elements, which butt up against whatever they’re trying to say.  This isn’t helped along when the message isn’t well expressed, but Pure takes a deeper hit because of how much potential there is in the setup, then going out of its way to suck out any dread or impact at various steps.