THE DELIVERANCE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Deliverance, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 29, 2024

The Deliverance starts as one story—about a mother struggling with single parenthood, financial troubles, and her own demons—before it becomes an entirely different one—about all of that, yes, but with the conspicuous addition of a literal demon. For a bit, it seems as if director Lee Daniels' movie might fall into that uncomfortable territory of forcing real trauma into the metaphorical realm of a horror tale, but as soon as the director and the screenplay (written by David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum) decide to turn this into a simple and simplistic horror movie, it might get worse.

The movie definitely becomes more familiar and formulaic with that ultimate turn, including shadowy figures lurking in the background and attacking characters, people being possessed and behaving in unusual or dangerous ways, and a climax that has characters shouting prayers and incantations at the embodiment of a supernatural evil. The supposed twist on that last part, apparently, is that the character who starts this process insists it's not an exorcism but a deliverance.

Semantics aside, something that looks, sounds, and acts like an exorcism can be called anything, but when it comes to a supernatural horror movie, the ritual is still an exorcism for all intents and purposes. Nothing about what happens in this movie changes just because the filmmakers try to convince us it's something else.

The whole of the movie is trying to convince us of something—several things, in fact. Initially, Daniels attempts to play the material as a straight domestic drama, revolving around Ebony (a solid Andra Day, who stays true to this character regardless of how many things shift around her). She's a mother of three kids—eldest Nate (Caleb McLaughlin), Shante (Demi Singleton), and younger son Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins)—who's currently raising them alone while their father is deployed with the military in Iraq.

The only real help she has is her mother Alberta (Glenn Close), although mom is so busy with church, chemotherapy treatments, flirtations with younger men, and judging her daughter that she's not much of a help. The casting of Close is an intriguing one, as Alberta appears to be the only white woman in the Pittsburgh neighborhood where the family has moved, but there's so much else going on in the story that any examination of her character or the decades of history the mother and daughter have together isn't present here.

Instead, Alberta fulfills two roles: as a recent convert to Christianity and as a mother who either abused or allowed abuse to happen to her daughter. This, apparently, explains why Ebony is essentially a functioning alcoholic, why she resents Alberta and her criticism of Ebony's parenting so much, and why Ebony is so emotionally and, at times, physically rough with her own children. The setup of these characters and relationships, founded upon a cycle of trauma and abuse, is fascinating and discomforting, while seeming to be heading somewhere once Ebony realizes that something has become very wrong after the family's most recent move.

Again, Coggeshall and Bynum don't have time for or, apparently, interest in any of that. Soon enough, flies begin buzzing around the house, first from the basement (which is explained) and later inside the walls (which isn't), and Andre starts speaking to an invisible friend.

The kids start missing school, first because Ebony doesn't wake up to drive them after a night out and later when all three children have experiences that shock them and everyone around them. Mo'Nique plays the social services worker who tries to get Ebony to realize she might be part of the problem and the reason the kids are behaving as they are. All of that talk, like so much of any conversations or potential insight about the generational impact of pain and violence, turns out to be hollow and, ultimately, results in nothing.

After all, this material ultimately becomes a straightforward horror story, in which everything can be explained and solved by some supernatural force. Ebony learns the truth from Bernice (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a minister who knows the house's wicked history and believes more than almost anything else that a demon is responsible for everything bad that happens within it. From there, it's probably pointless to describe what happens, because it's the common stuff of any tale like this. People move in physically impossible ways. The kids' behavior becomes more extreme, and it all leads to a shouty and jump-scare-filled showdown.

It's the usual, in other words. That's dull enough on its own, but it feels especially egregious in The Deliverance, which bypasses whatever reality these characters have to face for some, if the claim of being inspired by a true story is to be believed, "real" supernatural nonsense.

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