The Deliverance (2024)
First screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Lee Daniels. Cast: Andra Day, Glenn Close, Anthony B. Jenkins, Caleb McLaughlin, Demi Singleton, Mo'Nique, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Omar Epps, Tasha Smith, Colleen Camp, Miss Lawrence, Nealla Gordon. Screenplay: David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum, with Lee Daniels.
VOR: ②  I credit it for going balls to the wall, and concept wasn't unpromising, despite egregious mishandling. Last act is a creepy cop-out?


Photo © 2024 Netflix / Tucker Tooley Entertainment
"I don't do exorcisms. I don't need an intercessor. Jesus Christ is my intercessor."

Aunjanue, with respect, you needed an intercessor so bad. Everybody needed that intercessor. That person to put their philanthropic body between an innocent victim and a superbad thing about to go down. When audience members at my showing of The Deliverance, all four of us, saw anyone on screen blink, we knew they were sending us a hostage signal: "Please, intercessor, come save me from the worst movie made since Cats."

The Deliverance is a faith-based horror film directed by Lee Daniels, and that combination should be enough to tell you it is crazy as shit. Hilariously tagging itself as "based on true events" (and yes, I know, but also you guyyysssss), this inexplicably 111-minute movie tells the story of four talented adult actresses and three kids, each with good moments, who all get possessed into making some trash. Andra Day, talented but erratic, leaning hard on a distinctive but even more erratic director while perhaps insufficiently trusting her own instincts, is a struggling and abusive mother of three who comes to believe that her three children, 10-ish (Anthony B. Jenkins), 15-ish (King Richard's Demi Singleton), and 17-ish (Caleb McLaughlin), are all being possessed by a demon, or many demons. Glenn Close, bless her heart, loudly singing "I Would Do Anything for Acting (And I'll Even Do That)," is Day's born-again live-in mother, also a past abuser. Mo'Nique plays the frank-talk, Sister-I-need-to-set-you-straight version of Mo'Nique, as the Child Protective Services agent repeatedly dropping in on this family. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, brave and skilled enough to play with unironic conviction "an apostle, a prophet-evangelist" who holds meetings about spiritual crisis in McDonalds, is this movie's answer to Jason Miller and Max von Sydow. She has to stand there and sprinkle holy water and take it while the Devil, speaking through the body of a quite unexpected character, tells her from across the room they "can smell your nappy pussy." Offscreen, Octavia Spencer plays the famously whipsmart actress Octavia Spencer, who had the good sense to rustle up some "scheduling conflicts" and bow out of Aunjanue's role before getting baked into this shit pie.

This family is the kind that lives under constant threat that the electricity will be turned off, and based on the chronically too-dark images, that seems to have happened. It's as if the ComEd person who came by to cut the power got somehow listed as Director of Photography. (Even the poster is under-lit.) If money's this tight, maybe the family could rent out its improbably giant basement to the NBA. The editing is a nervous hash: some scenes feel clearly like they're missing their endings, or beginnings, or like key coverage was never supplied.

The genuinely piss-poor filmmaking might not have mattered (I say, might not) if The Deliverance were crazy as shit in a more fun way, as The Paperboy was, though at least the new movie suggests Daniels is setting up house and ordering all his prescriptions somewhere quite far away from the ersatz church-pageant prestige of The Butler. Though maybe not that far away. Now we're doing ersatz, church-pageant Halloween fundraisers, staging all kinds of tacky, inept nonsense and cloaking its garishness under a mantle of ill-earned solemnity. Maybe Close and her wigs and her hoochie outfits and her makeup and her drawling way of protesting at dinner that "this catefish got tew much gawwwlick" threaten to give you the giggles. If so, you'll surely sober up and repent at the end card that repeats "Our story is inspired by the life of Latoya Ammons," with her picture splayed across the screen. The hawkeyed will note in the ensuing credit roll the same Latoya Ammons listed as Associate Producer, which goes a long way to explaining why The Deliverance takes this ...much-disputed account from the early 2010s at face value, with that face in full pancake makeup and fright wig.

"Associate Producer" in Hollywood usually means a) you did jack shit but the project at some point had your fingerprints on it, and you have a wily lawyer, b) you paid for a lot of this movie, even though your creative input was zilch, or c) you traded away the rights to your story in exchange for this obligatory name-check. In this case, A and B both seem unlikely to me. And if you want to see a filmmaker dance with bare feet on hot sheet metal, despite the movie's full-bore attitude of THIS SHIT HAPPENED ((more or less)) AND WE OF COURSE HONOR LATOYA, here is Daniels in The Hollywood Reporter talking about his story inspiration, dedicatee, and associate producer, whom he maybe did and maybe didn't ever even meet:
"It’s my interpretation of her life story. I purposely didn’t want to meet her because I was nervous. But I spoke to her, I believe once or twice, in the beginning. And she’s lovely. She was at peace. What I’ve changed a little bit is I made her mother white because I have so many mixed-race friends and [I wanted to talk about] what it’s like to have a white mother and live in a Black girl’s body. And the deliverance person was actually a guy and not a girl. But there are so many women that do this work too, that don’t get recognized, so I changed that a little bit, and of course their names and such. I really wanted to separate as much as I could so I could make it my own story."
Thankfully, Daniels has an unbroken track record of getting along well with collaborators and industry figures and speaking well of them afterward, from actors like Mo'Nique to directors like Nicole Kassell (whom he hired to direct The Woodsman but later said, as producer, that he basically directed the whole thing himself) to the legal teams and copyright people he seems to have pissed off so royally that his films got stuck with platypus titles like Lee Daniels' The Butler and Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. So I extra believe Daniels that he probably-maybe-I think talked to his putative inspiration Latoya somewhere way back when, much like President Biden isn't sure if he watched his own disastrous debate but believes he did not. And I'm not worried at all that Latoya Ammons's truth has been taken away and turned into this with a modicum of her own input OR that a made-up, sensationalist story from a woman in dire straits and three vulnerable kids has been consecrated as Bible-banging fact. Or, in some crazy way, both. Or that Glenn Close has once again farmed out her talent and her name to a "true" story perhaps best left untold.

What really matters is that the too-often-overlooked community of female exorcists or "deliverance people" finally has the representation they have long craved. And as soon as someone turns on an actual light, we'll be able to really see these marginalized heroes and to celebrate them while speaking in tongues. Grade: D–

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

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