DELIVER US - Mark Reviews Movies

Deliver Us, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 28, 2023

It's a bit funny how prophecy looks a lot like plot convenience and contrivance in Deliver Us, a bloody and horny but utterly silly piece of religion-based pulp. The movie opens with the ritual sacrifice and flaying of multiple Zoroastrian clerics, whose tattooed skin displays some ancient foretelling of a Catholic version of the apocalypse for some reason. One could look at this as a commentary on the universality of certain religious beliefs or as a blatant critique of the potential cruelty of institutionalized faith, but it's pretty obvious that the filmmakers think it's a nasty way to begin a movie.

There's a similar feeling of randomness to just about everything that follows that opening. The plot of co-director Lee Roy Kunz and his brother Kane's screenplay revolves around the supposed virgin conception of twins within the womb of a nun. According to that flesh-based prophecy, one of those babies will be the Second Coming, while the other will be the Antichrist.

As for how or why a religion that existed several hundred or a couple millennia before the advent of Christianity would even consider a forecast that's so specific to a future faith system, it's also important to note that an old man living in a cabin in the woods comes up with even more specific prophecies by way of paintings in this movie. The old man, by the way, is also the grandfather of the pregnant lover of the main character, a Catholic priest.

It's a bit fascinating that anyone doubts the authenticity of this prophecy, given how perfectly lined up everything just happens to be in order for this story to exist. One would have to acknowledge the presence of some divine hand guiding people and events to such a clean set of alignments—or, at least, consider that they're characters in a very poorly written bit of fiction.

The latter's the case here, obviously, as the Kunz brothers and co-director Cru Ennis force more and more happy happenstances into this story, without really caring too much if it possesses characters who aren't cosmic pawns or a plot that follows logically from one step to the next. The priest is Fr. Fox (played by the co-writing/co-directing Kunz), who's an expert in the field of exorcisms (The one thing, perhaps, that's established but never used by the script) and has fallen in love with Laura (Jaune Kimmel), who owns and operates a family mining business in Estonia.

His Church bosses assign Fr. Fox to investigate this alleged case of non-sexual conception at a convent in St. Petersburg, leading him to Sr. Yulia (Maria Vera Ratti), the pregnant nun. She has been having visions of the future, and the one-eyed Fr. Saul (Thomas Kretschmann), who oversaw the murders during the prologue, is convinced the end-times prophecy will come true and wants to put a stop to it for reasons that are neither philosophically nor theologically explained. He's the villain, and that's enough, apparently.

Somehow, the movie isn't based on some throwaway airport novel but is an original concept by the screenwriters, who clearly have been inspired more by trash schlock than anything of even minor theological value. That's fine, in theory, as long as the movie acknowledges or embraces it in some way. Here, though, Ennis and Kunz play it all painfully straight and severe, despite the presence of a mind-controlling baby, a shared sex dream that arrives at a simultaneous climax, Fr. Saul's elaborate means of hunting the babies but his constant hesitation in actually doing anything, and that all-too convenient dead grandfather and his oil paint-based prophecies.

All of this is so ridiculous that it almost seems impossible to believe that the filmmakers aren't at least somewhat aware of it. So much of the movie offers such deliberate provocations that it feels a bit daring. However, the unintentional acts of needling—notably in how both of the women here are essentially or literally disposable plot devices—point more toward the screenwriters accidentally falling into seeming as if they're trying to say more than they mean to. When it comes to something like this, it is probably better to appreciate even a little potential underneath the surface—no matter how inadvertent it may be.

Deliver Us makes it so tough to do so, though. Everything about its story is over-the-top and nonsensical, but the filmmakers inject it with a heavy dose of dread seriousness. That's an unfortunate and laughable approach to this kind of material.

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