‘The Deliverance’ Review: Lee Daniels Delivers a Horror Misfire
While Andra Day, Mo’Nique and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor deliver terrific performances, Lee Daniels makes the cardinal mistake of turning the strong family drama of The Deliverance into a run-of-the-mill possession flick and never recovers.
In The Deliverance, director Lee Daniels and writers David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum craft a compelling family drama in its first half. While bathing in tropes and predictability, it contains a rock-solid turn from Andra Day as Ebony Jackson, an alcoholic mother battling her inner demons while caring for her children, Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins), Nate (Caleb McLaughlin), and Shante (Demi Singleton). The trio are constantly neglected by her mother, who drinks herself to death and ignores their needs, whilst her mother, Alberta (Glenn Close), is being treated for cancer and moves into their new home.
Things are complicated when Department of Child Services worker Cynthia (Mo’Nique) arrives and believes Ebony is abusing their children while drunk and does not remember what happened when she wakes up. While Cynthia won’t do anything for now, custody of Ebony’s children are now in jeopardy. It’s a classic drama the audience have seen countless times before, but Daniels directs these sequences with the same sensitivity that garnered him six Oscar nominations for 2009’s Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. Day is as good, if not better, than she was in her Oscar-nominated turn in Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday, and the quiet devastation of Mo’Nique’s Cynthia as she tells Ebony how she lost her son will stay with me for a long time.
Mo’Nique had won an Oscar for her turn in Precious as Claireece’s abusive mother, and to see her in a role that’s a complete reversal of the character, while reuniting with Daniels, is an interesting contrast. She’s now on the other side of Ebony, attempting to understand what’s truly going on in her life, while recognizing the pain of being trapped inside situations that keep spiraling out of control. Her mother’s Medicaid has expired and she is now forced to pay exorbitantly expensive healthcare bills for her chemotherapy while barely getting by on her family’s basic needs. This occurs while their father is on tour in Iraq and is totally absent from their lives, promising to get back as soon as possible, but with no hope in sight. All of this is too much for Ebony to bear, and her only way to cope with this mounting pressure is to drink herself to death.
So why, when the basis for the movie is solid enough and contains two gripping performances, must this drama suddenly become a possession thriller? Ebony’s children begin to experience strange occurrences, such as Andre defecating in his classroom, or Shante having her period during choir and standing on stage, doing nothing about it. Of course, the doctors and Cynthia don’t believe anything Ebony is saying on her kids and think they are being abused, which further complicates matters with Child Services, and her mother, who takes the children’s side. Close isn’t half-bad either for the bulk of the film as a devout catholic who found a newfound purpose in living amidst her diagnosis after developing a close bond to the Holy Spirit. While underdeveloped, the relationship between the two is palpable enough, until it becomes the possession flick and Daniels has Academy Award nominated Close say to Apostle Bernice James (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), “I can smell your nappy pussy,” while caked in horrendous makeup.
With cheap jumpscares and unimpressive visual effects, the film’s dramatic core becomes completely diluted, because Daniels ultimately loses sight of what he wants to talk about: a mother on the brink of collapse attempting to pull the pieces back together while lapses in memory from her addiction to alcohol makes her perceived as a threat to Cynthia, when she is not harming her children. This entire possession arc never gives Ebony full agency, even if she asks Aunjanue’s Bernice help, after she tells her the house she lives in is haunted and hosts a dark spirit inside.
Of course, Aunjanue is terrific and portrays Bernice with striking immediacy, convincing Ebony of the gravity of the situation she is now stuck in and attempts to deliver the Lord’s guiding hand to her children. Not an exorcism, she explains, but a deliverance. However, one can’t help but see Max von Sydow’s Father Lankester Merrin hanging on the shadow of Bernice, as she ‘delivers’ her quasi-exorcism with prayer, holy water and the same Biblical “power of Christ” spiel we see in every demonic possession movie. In this section, the drama is completely gone, in favor of bluntly violent scenes with little to no emotional weight and “gotcha!” moments that belong in a completely different movie than the one we were invested in.
It's a true shame, because Day, Mo’Nique and Ellis-Taylor do superb work here, only for all of it to be completely hampered by a generic permutation that never gives the movie the direction it needs to truly shine. Even when Daniels ends his picture on a hopeful note, it still doesn’t erase the baffling decisions that completely sink his latest movie. You can tell he’s still incredibly sensible on issues that he holds dear and tries to raise awareness to them as much as he can in the film. But he didn’t have to go to the possession route to make that point clear. It only makes The Deliverance feel more illogical and less impactful than it should be. Sometimes, it’s best to pick and choose one genre to get your story across the finish line, and one was far more appropriate and well-handled than the other. In this case, a traditional human drama would’ve worked just fine.