‘The Deliverance’ Movie Review: Strong Cast Cannot Be Fully Saved By Demonic Nonsense
Photo from Netflix
From Jeremy Kibler
Take all of the basement flies, imaginary friends, demonic voices, and bone-cracking out of Lee Daniels’ horror melodrama and The Deliverance would probably be better for it. Even if it’s based on the real-life experience of Latoya Ammons, the film never quite figures out how it wants to intersect the human element—intergenerational abuse and addiction—with religion and supernatural horror nonsense. One part is more compelling than the other, but at least Daniels lets his actors go for it.
Andra Day’s robust, uncompromising performance is one saving grace as Ebony Jackson, a hairdresser and struggling single mother of three kids—teenage Shante (Demi Singleton, King Richard) and Nate (Caleb McLaughlin, Stranger Things) and 9-year-old Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins)—while her husband is fighting in Iraq. They’ve just recently moved into a rental in Pittsburgh (which director Daniels does make clear with a vivid sense of place). Ebony has also agreed to letting her born-again Christian mother, Alberta (Glenn Close, looking like a drag queen of Glenn Close the first time we see her), live with them while she goes to chemotherapy. Though Ebony has given up the drink, she still isn’t perfect, and just as child services officer Cynthia (Mo’Nique) checks in, the three children end up having bruises. Is Ebony back to her old ways, or is there something evil in the house? Where are Ed and Lorraine Warren when you need them to perform a deliverance?
The Deliverance begins as a more credible drama before devolving into formulaic horror theatrics (though an intercut episode of what gets all three Jackson kids hospitalized is decidedly attention-getting). The screenplay by David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum decides to take the less ambiguous angle of this story, and not the one where perhaps the house was not actually haunted. That extra layer of a Black woman not being believed adds urgency, but the film’s alleged basis in reality only takes this so far. It then just feels like a hundred other possession movies, and a copy of a copy of a copy is never as effective.
Lucas Vidal’s score aids with some of the creepiness, but it’s saying something when a mere glance from Andra Day is more chilling than any of the perfunctory paranormal stuff. By the way, if an unpleasant smell and flies are clearly coming from the basement, perhaps check on it the first time rather than swatting them away and closing the door.
There is something so effortlessly electric and watchable about Andra Day, and she’s able to bring nuance to some mostly two-dimensional writing to the surly, hardened Ebony. Neither Day nor Glenn Close try sugarcoating the very flawed Ebony and Alberta, whose complicated, tumultuous relationship rooted in pain and trauma could be seen from space. On the other hand, there’s a touching, observant slice-of-life moment where Alberta is sewing in her daughter’s weave while Ebony does the same to her daughter, while they’re all watching Valley of the Dolls on TV and quoting every line.
Matching the overstated capital-A acting of her work as Mamaw in Hillbilly Elegy, Close turns in the film’s showiest (and funniest) performance as another piece of work. There is nothing understated about the bosomy, chain-smoking Alberta, a child of God all dolled up in a wig of the day, her drawn-on eyebrows, sexy blouses, and ripped jeans. For those who like a little camp, Close does get to utter a jaw-droppingly profane line about smelling something, and it may be the one thing that takes your breath away in The Deliverance.
Mo’Nique (back to work with pal Lee Daniels) brings a sternness to social worker Cynthia, but there’s also an empathy that one can see why she is the way she is and why she does the work that she does. Finally, as Reverend Bernice James who calls herself an apostle, Aunjuanue Ellis-Taylor is tasked with exposition about Ebony’s haunted house (while they’re at McDonald’s) but does it with gravitas.
One can always have faith in Lee Daniels as a filmmaker that he will deliver a spectacular cast and not a ton of subtlety. Because it has to, The Deliverance culminates with an over-the-top, fire-and-brimstone finale where a character speaks in tongues and rids the demon back to hell. There’s the wish that Daniels made his pro-faith possession movie even more lurid and unhinged, but what it ends up feeling is a little standard with only bursts of insanity.
A more powerful and provocative film about finding a higher power in a time of crisis (or just a more entertaining disaster) is screaming to get out of The Deliverance, but not even intensely committed acting turns can save the overwrought mess it eventually becomes.
Rating: 2/5
The Deliverance is in select theaters and will stream on Netflix on August 30, 2024.
