'The Deliverance' review: Strong cast can’t salvage Lee Daniels’ mediocre exorcism drama
Courtesy of Netflix
The cast Lee Daniels has assembled for his long-in-the-works passion project is no joke. Between Mo’Nique, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Andra Day, and Glenn Close, the ensemble is stacked with enough pedigree to get the most pessimistic viewers on board for “The Deliverance,” an “inspired” by a true story account about a real-life case involving Latoya Ammons, a single mother who claimed her house was haunted and needed a “deliverance,” which is another term for exorcism. But any goodwill only extends as far as the cast, who count several Oscar nominations and a win among them, as the rest of the movie is a silly, monotonous trek that tries and fails to show a family unit battling their demons.
Daniels can be a talented filmmaker, directing both Halle Berry (“Monsters Ball”) and Mo’Nique (“Precious”) to Oscar glory and finding moderate commercial success with “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” and you can tell that, by dabbling with body horror and trying to blend those elements with a domesticated family drama, he’s trying to explore new avenues and provide context to Ammons’ paranormal claims. Some of which had been cast aside as a drama queen who was only looking for attention.
Daniels could have made an inventive, engaging movie about what Ammons claimed to experience, and instead gives “The Deliverance” over to lousy exorcism troupes; rather than using the a haunted house as a metaphor for the racial and equity divide that people of color are often forced to confront. Day’s towering, emotionally resilient performance playing an Ammons stand-in named Ebony and Mo’Nique as her social worker do their best to keep the film on track, but then you have Close essentially doing “Hillbilly Elegy” part two (where she played J.D. Vance’s gun toting, “T2” loving, God fearing grandmother Mamaw) as another grandmother named Alberta, who has found her faith and is trying to repent for years of being an abusive parent and, well, it’s really hard to stay focused.
For a while at least, it feels like Daniel’s is going to keep the focus on Ebony and her three children Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins), Nate (“Stranger Things” star Caleb McLaughlin), and Shante (Demi Singleton) as they try finding their footing amid various degrees of adversity. We’re told Dad is serving in Iraq, but is not sending any money; grandma is currently undergoing cancer treatments, and Ebony’s drug and alcoholism has put her on thin ice with a court-appointed social worker (Mo’Nique).
This is where the supernatural element comes into play and “The Deliverance” becomes another derivative horror-thriller, where, as is usually the case in these movies, the children are possessed and start exhibiting abnormal behaviors, like banging their heads on basement doors, throwing excrement at their school teachers, and attempting to drown another sibling and having no recollection of it. This demonic spirit is also crafty where it’ll make things appear as though Ebony is the one causing damage, thus putting an unwanted spotlight on herself.
Taylor shows up late in the game as someone who calls herself a “beacon,” detailing a battle with an evil force that latched onto her child, but her compelling presence notwithstanding, “The Deliverance” struggles to wrestle themes (and the “beacons” origin story) around the bond of family and the power of faith into anything other than your run-of-the-mill exorcism thriller.
It comes across stagnant and not very compelling nor does the film expand on various subplots or minor character details, including the turmoil surrounding the kids father, Alberta’s destructive past or her fling with local neighborhood staple Melvin (Omar Epps) which is a sentence I never thought I’d be writing in the year of our lord 2024. Close and Epps? I’ll say this for Daniels, at least he thinks outside the box. Just not enough to save “The Deliverance” from itself.
Grade: C-
THE DELIVERANCE streams on Netflix Friday, August 30th.
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