Released 2024. Director: Lee Daniels
AN UNRECOGNISABLY DEMONIC LOOKING GLENN CLOSE with sharp teeth in The Deliverance piqued my curiosity. Expecting a solid fright of the seat-clutching variety, I was disappointed. There’s little that’s suspenseful, tense or frightening in this tepid horror movie stuffed with recycled tropes.
Knowing the haunted house and demonic possession sub-genre is prone to be clichéd ridden, I was hoping a director like Lee Daniels would bring some new ideas. Nope. The movie, claimed to be inspired by a true story, involves Ebony and her three kids who have just moved into a rented house. Something stinks in the basement and flies are buzzing, yet for weeks nobody ever bothers to check what’s down there. The youngest kid, Andre, speaks with an imaginary friend, guzzles an entire carton of milk despite being lactose intolerant. His sister Shante and brother Nate also encounter weird experiences in the house.
All this time Ebony simply assumes the kids are just being kids. She’s a single mum working to support her family, paying for her mother’s chemotherapy and dealing with her own alcohol addiction, so she’s stressed enough. Ebony’s social service officer Cynthia is not convinced that Ebony’s completely honest about her drinking or how the kids get their bruises. Long story short, nobody believes she has nothing to do with the bad stuff happening to her kids, until things get next level bananas and a Reverend Bernice shows up to tell her about the demon in their house and what happened to the last family who lived there. Didn’t any neighbour come over to share such a horrific story as a welcome caution?
The first half is decent enough, taking its time to set up the human drama. Then the “deliverance” part kicks in and the movie crumbles badly. No amount of praying or reciting the Lord’s name could improve a severe case of over-familiarity compounded by a lack of originality.
To be fair, Daniels invests a lot of time on Ebony to establish her character as caring (she pays for her mother’s treatment, stands up for her kids and gives them what they want) but also always angry and tired, so maybe we should cut Ebony some slack. I was waiting for the movie to develop into something more besides simply ticking boxes. Demonic voices, eyes turning black, bodies contort, a smoking crucifix, kid doing spider-climb, all common tropes delivered without the chill factor. Daniels rose to prominence directing the Oscar-winning Precious, an emotional powerhouse of a movie. It’s not unreasonable to expect some depth in his take on a besieged black family and some metaphoric expressions of social oppression in The Deliverance. But there’s none of that. Instead, Daniels mishandles the supernatural threat giving us a derivative and rather dull recycling of what we’ve seen before in the last few decades.
The second half of the movie is one clunky sequence after another. The showdown in the basement is especially painful to watch because directing scary scenes is not Daniels' forte. I get that in the end the message is that a mother’s love is strong enough to defeat any demon, but it’s a weak demonstration of an overused idea. The inter-generational discontent, an emotional underpinning that runs through the movie, is only given a superficial probe. The psychological demons that haunt the family are acknowledged but never properly dealt with.
The saving grace is the performances, which just about sustains the interest level. Andra Day gives Ebony a fighting spirit. Glenn Close brings some weight to a secondary role and Mo’Nique commands every scene she’s in. Besides that, there’s little else going on for it.
An effective horror movie should linger in your mind, etch itself in your consciousness and even keep you awake. After watching The Deliverance, I slept like a baby.
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