Mark Reviews Movies: DELIA'S GONE

Delia's Gone, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 18, 2022

The man awakens after a drunken night to discover that his sister, the only family member he has, is dead, and his hands are covered in her blood. That's the starting point of Delia's Gone, which is a murder mystery, of course, about the brother's search for the truth of his sister's death.

That's slightly putting it simply. The complication here is that Louis (Stephan James), the brother, suffered traumatic brain damage as a child after nearly drowning. The side effects of the damage are the equivalent, according to a therapist, of those of people on the autism spectrum.

That's about where the development of this character and writer/director Robert Budreau's attempt to do something different with this straightforward mystery end. There's something a bit disconcerting that this man and his way of thinking are treated as a plot device and a somewhat novel gimmick, but that's the case with Budreau's movie.

Louis isn't a joke at least, in that the movie doesn't try to make us laugh at the character's desperate search for the truth, but the absence of that kind of cruelty isn't a virtue of the storytelling. Indeed, the whole plot is kind of a situational gag, because Louis' thinking and behavior drive everything, and isn't it odd, the movie seems to be intrinsically arguing, that it's this particular guy who's overseeing an amateur murder investigation?

The sister is Delia (Genelle Williams), who's planning to leave Louis for a job out of state, and after he becomes angry at the idea, she goes off to a bar. In the morning, he finds her dead, and local Sheriff Fran (Marissa Tomei) and her deputy Bo (Paul Walter Hauser) arrive to discover the scene. Louis is sentenced to five years in prison, and a couple years after that, he is in voluntary care at a mental health facility.

Fran's brother Stacker (Travis Fimmel) visits Louis one day. He has cancer and wants to confess something to Louis about Delia's death. Before he can finish, though, Louis has another outburst (All of this is terribly inconvenient for Louis but convenient in a pretty contrived way to have an actual mystery that needs solving). Leaving the facility, Louis sets off to find out who killed Delia.

The rest of the plotting is routine and straightforward, with Louis interrogating various suspects, while Frank, now a state detective, and Bo, the Sheriff, try to find him before someone gets hurt. James does what he can here, but Budreau has provided the actor with the unenviable task of playing a character whose entire existence, in addition to being little more than a gimmick, is reduced to a series of physical and verbal tics.

Delia's Gone doesn't see its protagonist as anything more or anyone beyond those characteristics. The result is a bland and predictable mystery that unfortunately uses a neurological issue as a cheap gimmick.

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