Lee Daniels has never been a director afraid of high camp. Heightened drama and borderline exploitation cinematic tropes are used to extract and display his characters’ trauma. This allows for a kind of Sirkian highwire act, where he knowingly plays up the melodrama but shrewdly boils the subtext underneath the surface.
But his latest movie, The Deliverance, an attempt at Faith-based horror, is mainly bereft of complexity. But the melodrama is still there. Hoo-boy, is it ever! Set in Gary, Indiana, and based on ‘true events,’ The Deliverance attempts to blend blaxploitation and The Exorcist. The result is a film that never works but is impossible to look away from.
David Coggeshall and Elijah Byrun’s script is so slap-dash that it’s hardly fair to place all the blame on Daniels. At its heart, The Deliverance feels like the writers speaking to the Eddie Murphy bit about how a Black family would never have stood for the goings on in Amityville. The joke is that they would be out when the walls started bleeding.
But in The Deliverance, Daniels and the writers show why they stay: because they’re poor. Black poverty is the absolute horror in The Deliverance. Or it would be if either Daniels or the script had bothered to make every scene a meal. There’s the rub, though. Daniels knows how to make a movie, but sometimes, in the case of The Deliverance, we’re left wondering if this is the movie he was aiming for.
Ebony Jackson (Andra Day) is a single mom trying to raise her three kids. She’s not single; her husband is in Iraq, but the dialogue hints that their marriage is on the rocks. Ebony is helped by her white mother, Alberta (Glenn Close). Both women show signs of abuse along with a struggle to try and break the cycle. Except for Daniels, the script is often so blunt that it borderlines on flippant.
Day’s Jackson feels like she’s in a separate movie from everybody else. But this isn’t Day’s fault, as none of the performances feel like they belong in the same film. The disconnect leads to the overwhelming failure of a cohesive tone. She’s either too subdued or too explosive. It’s not until the end that Day finds her footing in the character.
Still, if you ever wanted to see Glenn Close in coochie shorts sporting a bald head from chemo, walking down the stairs, shoulders hunched, with a baseball bat and a ‘try me bitch’ look in her eyes, then do I have a movie for you. But Close is so good that seeing her grind up against Omar Epps, who plays a nurse at the Chemo Therapy Center, is hilarious and believable.
The Deliverance wants to be thrilling, but it never really is. Daniels and his writers seem to understand what makes movies about exorcisms tick but seem unable to replicate them. Though they do a good job stealing from them, they do a lousy job of making them effective.
Flies that seem to always be around the basement door, dead animals stinking up the house, children sleepwalking, real and CGI-enhanced contortions, walking on the walls, and the sense that they are never alone are all present in The Deliverance. But none of it works as anything remotely scary. Yet, it makes for a great time.
The melodrama of The Deliverance overshadows everything else. The possession of Ebony’s youngest child, Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins), is the catalyst. Ebony’s past alcoholism and her recent history of beating her children are the fuel. But Daniels can’t help himself when it comes to bad taste and will gleefully go the unnecessary extra mile.
At one point in the movie, after the possession has spread to the other two children, Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) and Shante (Demi Singelton), Daniels shows the three kids at school having very different episodes. Andre begins throwing feces at his teacher, Nate begins laughing uncontrollably, and Shante begins to bleed menstrual blood.
If Daniels had a little tighter reigns on the material, these scenes would show the genuine anxieties of the children who are going through changes both physically and mentally due to puberty and moving to a new home.
Instead, we get howlers like the scene where Day’s Ebony yells at a nurse, “My son ate sh** today!” Daniels is telling us this instead of showing it is what passes for restraint for Daniels. None of the heavy stuff lands like drama; instead, between the clumsy script and Daniels’s flair for campness, plays like high comedy.
Unfortunately, in interviews, Daniels is trying to make a scary religious movie for Black people. “I want to scare you back to Jesus,” he says. I can’t imagine anyone being scared during The Deliverance. This movie telegraphs every jumpscare and obliterates tension so clumsily that I’m not exactly sure what we’re supposed to be afraid of.
The most perplexing aspect of all this is how Daniels attempts to mimic the success of The Exorcist and, more recently, James Wan’s The Conjuring. Both movies are based on “true events,” which walk the tightrope between the facial and the horrifying and use the reality of the situation to ground and amplify the dread. However, the key to both movies is a sense of the supernatural world.
Too much of The Deliverance is unconcerned with faith or the logistics of how or why demons possess. However, I did appreciate how Reverend Bernice James (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) essentially fired strays at the Catholic Church.
As much as I’ve used the word ‘exorcism’ in this review, Daniels tries to illustrate the difference between a “deliverance” and an ‘exorcism.’ Deliverance ministry is about finding spiritual strongholds, whereas the Catholic church requires intercessors and middlemen. I find this aspect fascinating, but sadly, Daniels doesn’t. Or perhaps it’s my white ignorance. Either way, the religious element, which should be the underpinning of The Deliverance, feels like an afterthought.
The faith aspect of The Deliverance suffers from such malnutrition that by the time Ellis-Taylor comes on and nearly steals the show, her exposition becomes almost neverending. It is a monologue so well delivered that the fact she and Day have this conversation in the middle of a McDonald’s doesn’t matter. The location is another example of how Daniels tries to ground the story but also leans too far into camp, as it’s hard to take anything seriously when the camera is making sure to get the McCafe Cup center frame. Ellis-Taylor is in The Deliverance, which is far too brief. Still, when she’s onscreen, Daniels captures a hint of what I think he was trying to achieve. It’s a pity the movie takes so long to find its footing.
The last half, when the demons start going the whole hog, is when The Deliverance begins to hum, not in the camp sense. But sadly, by then, it’s been so mired in the many gangling narratives that it feels cheap and fragmented despite Eli Arenson’s camera evoking a kind of dark beauty.
But then the final moments get trapped in a syrupy sentimentality that undoes The Deliverance. Daniels tries too hard to hammer home the veracity of the ‘true events’ and only makes them seem even more unbelievable. In the end, neither faith nor the demons feels like anything other than a contrivance.
Yet, I can’t deny how I was having a good time even through the most absurd moments. I was never moved or scared, but I was entertained. A symphony of wrong notes conducted with enough verve I couldn’t help but be tickled.
Images courtesy of Netflix
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