Film Review: The Deliverance

The Deliverance
Director: Lee Daniels
Lee Daniels Entertainment, Tucker Tooley Entertainment and Turn Left Productions
Streaming on Netflix: 08.30

When I give a movie a weak review, more often than not it’s because, on some level, I feel that the director didn’t succeed at making the film they set out to make. When I given a scathing review, it’s usually because the movie they were trying to make was an awful idea from the beginning. And every so often, there’s a movie like The Deliverance that leaves me with no clue what the filmmaker was trying to achieve, yet no less certain that they failed at it. 

Ebony Jackson (Andra Day, The United States vs. Billie Holiday) is a single mother struggling with a tough financial situation and far too frequently turning to alcohol to escape her problems. Ebony and her kids—Nate (Caleb McLaughlin, Stranger Things), Shante (Demi Singleton, King Richard) and Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins, Never Let Go)—hope to have a fresh start in Pittsburgh, with the help of her mother, Alberta (Glenn Close, Fatal Attraction, Hillbilly Elegy), a cancer patient undergoing treatment and newly-devout Christian who makes no secret of the fact that she disapproves of Ebony’s life choices. The tension between the two is palpable. Ebony is temperamental and frequently verbally abuses her children, even smacking them on occasion, and a social worker named Cynthia (Mo’Nique, Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire) is constantly looking over her shoulder, and not without reason. The children have unexplained bruises, Ebony is drunk at all hours of the day and she and her mother—who was abusive to Ebony as a child—are constantly fighting. The kids aren’t exactly having the time of their lives, as Nate faces bullying in the neighborhood, Shante pines for her absent father and young Andre finds solace in an imaginary friend named Trey. And just when it seems that things couldn’t get worse, in addition to their tendency to be covered in unexplained bruises, the kids all start to display frighteningly bizarre behaviorfirst at school, then at home—including speaking in tongues, climbing backwards up the walls, sobbing uncontrollably, and eating their own feces. It eventually becomes clear to Ebony that the kids are possessed, though, of course, no one believes her, so she brings in an expert, Reverend Bernice James (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, King Richard,  Origin) to perform an exorcism. These demons aren’t going to go with out a fight (possession is nine tenths of the law, after all) and Ebony must battle the forces of evil for the very souls of her family.

The Deliverance is a disjointed mess, with much of the first half of the film being an involving family drama and shifting on a dime to become an insipid and exploitative inner city take on The Exorcist. Daniels was inspired by the Ammons haunting case of 2011, which also involved a mother using demonic possession to explain her kids frequent absences from school, as well as their bruises, and has been largely debunked. It’s very hard to get around the feeling that the film is in remarkably bad taste in regards to its treatment of child abuse, and it reaches a point where it becomes truly baffling. A message of avoiding a judgemental view of our neighbors and recognizing that we never know what a person is going through is certainly worthwhile. It’s at best questionable as to whether that should extend to giving the benefit of the doubt to an alcoholic parent who asserts, “I’m not hitting my kids, the Devil is!”. The movie is far too dark and disturbing in its depiction of real world problems to be fun in any way, yet when it moves into full on horror mode, it loses all credibility as fact-based drama, leaving the clear question: why does this movie exist? By the end of the film, Ebony’s choice to get back together with the kids’ father and “try to make things work”  immediately had me wondering if I’d just watched a supernatural take on The Parent Trap.    

Day gives an intense and riveting performance, making Ebony starkly human—even if she’s rarely likable—and she single-handedly gives the film redeeming value. Close is a legendary actress who is long overdue an Oscar, and as a big fan, it’s more than a bit frustrating to watch her reduced to seeing if she can get a Best Supporting Actress win out of playing a cancer patient on her deathbed who grows fangs when the demon takes hold and starts spouting obscenities and racial slurs. The combination of fangs and the baldness that comes with chemotherapy gives Close a vampiric appearance, and deliberately using the effects of cancer to make a character look more creepy is an odious ploy that needs to be called out. Daniels owes a lot of people an apology for this crass choice. Ellis-Taylor is effective as the wise Reverend, and in a different film it could be an effective performance, but her arrival here simply signals that the movie is going completely off the rails.  The young actors who play the kids give impressive performances, but they all deserve a far better vehicle.

The Deliverance is the kind of movie that keeps your attention to the end, then leaves you feeling used and angry when it’s over. There’s no denying that there’s a certain degree of skill  involved in the filmmaking, but it’s all put toward such an unworthy end that if anything, that just gave me more to hold against it. This isn’t the first time that a major Netflix original has left me wishing that it was getting a more substantial theatrical run, but it is the first time that my reasoning was the knowledge that it would largely be ignored in theaters, whereas it’s likely to hurt many an unsuspecting viewer on streaming. –Patrick Gibbs

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