Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Deliverance’ on Netflix, Lee Daniels’ Conflicted Domestic Drama-Slash-Exorcism Thriller

Spooky season begins a smidge early this year courtesy Lee Daniels’ exorcism thriller The Deliverance (now on Netflix). Except it’s not technically “exorcism” – “deliverance” is a different type of activity that involves casting out the damn hell ass demons possessing one’s soul, not that most of us layfolk could tell by watching this movie. Conceptual hair-splitting and nitpickery aside, the film finds Daniels reuniting with two stars who scored Oscar noms via his work, Andra Day (who anchored his biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday ) and Mo’Nique (who won supporting actress gold for Precious ). The question here is whether this assemblage of talent can offer us something beyond the familiar tropes of this horror subgenre.

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The Gist: INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS, reads an opening title card. Ain’t that always the case? The setting is Pittsburgh, 2011. Ebony Jackson (Day) has just moved the kids and her mother into their new home, an old house with a stinky, stinky basement. Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins) is the youngest, Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) is the oldest and Shante (Demi Singleton) is in the middle. Their dad is out of the picture, fighting in Iraq for who knows how long, and the implication is that the marriage wasn’t going well. And so Ebony reluctantly invited her mom Alberta (Glenn Close) to live with them, because she needed the help. Money’s tight, the past-due bills are piling up and Ebony struggles with alcoholism. On the bottle, off the bottle, back on the bottle. She’s brash and angry and confrontational, and has a tendency to smack the kids when they get lippy, something she seems to have learned from Alberta. This is the type of family whose members say STFU to each other at the dinner table when emotions boil over. The dynamic is tense.

Alberta appears to have gone through a softening, or a revelation. Our first impression of her is wow she’s going a little too hard with the makeup and wigs , then we see her trek to the doctor’s office for chemotherapy and feel bad for being a little judgy. Now, she’s found Jesus, a guy who might come in handy after the movie spends an hour teasing us about WTF is going on with the basement. Flies swarm around the door and it emanates quite the stench. Ebony looks down there a bunch of times but never turns on a light or gets a mop and bucket and bleach and does something about it. It’s just one of those things you live with until you deal with the pots boiling over on the frontburners, e.g., wrestling with addiction, getting snippy with social services lady Cynthia (Mo’Nique), secretly paying Alberta’s chemo bills after her Medicare aid went away, etc.

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Kicking the can on the basement stank turns out to be a bad idea. Personal demons manifest upstairs, but actual ones may be farting around downstairs. Little Andre starts acting strangely, talking to an invisible friend named Trey. In a trancelike state, the kid repeatedly bangs his forehead on the door, which only makes Cynthia’s scrutiny of Ebony more intense. Ebony has weird dreams. All three kids experience disturbing incidents at school. And they keep spotting a strange woman (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) outside in her car, spying on them. They think that woman is in cahoots with Cynthia, who has that gonna-take-’em-to-a-foster-home-if-you-don’t look on her face, but they’re wrong. That’s the Reverend Bernice, and she isn’t Catholic, so she isn’t going to exorcise anything around here. But she just might DELIVERANCE something real hard before this movie ends.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Exorcist , The Exorcist: Believer and The Exorcism , but definitely not Deliverance .

Performance Worth Watching: As she did in Billie Holiday , Day gives a commendably strong, credible performance in a movie that possibly doesn’t deserve it. In her scenes opposite Mo’Nique, you sense the two of them working hard to push past the screenplay’s limitations.

Memorable Dialogue: Revelations!

Ebony: My son has this make-believe friend named Trey.

Rev. Bernice: That’s no friend. That’s the devil!

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Deliverance is a tale of two movies: An absorbing character-driven story that segues into all-too-familiar exorcism-thriller fodder during the second half. It’s not an abrupt transition, and Daniels maintains a consistently somber, humorless tone throughout, and Day is impressively committed to playing a complicated, conflicted woman. But it’s disappointing to see such an authentic, well-acted, ethically knotty domestic drama become yet another collection of post- The Exorcist tropes. Always with the blacked-over eyes and bodily spew and speaking in tongues and children doing and saying grotesque and unnatural things. It’s far past time for demonic possessors to revamp their bag of creepout tricks, which, in line with the great and irrepressible laws of movie cliches, always occur during window-rattling thunderstorms. (Even Close, who’s game for anything, as ever, gets her own crackity-bones scene (crackity crackity crackity BONES!) that adds to her pile of weird, overwrought, possibly embarrassing roles, e.g. Hillbilly Elegy , clunkfest Albert Nobbs and possibly even Fatal Attraction .)

Our instinct, as decent people, is to sympathize with Ebony, who is less than decent, and possibly a bad person, because she’s so quick to be verbally and physically abusive. We hope she’s capable of self-reflection and redemption, because she’s had a tough go of things. She brims with anger and resentment, and struggles to control her compulsions. The effort Day puts into the performances is ultimately diminished when the screenplay – by Daniels, David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum – deemphasizes that complexity for the simplistic good-and-evil binary of Jesus vs. Satan. There’s a moment deep into the film where Ebony’s conflict with herself transitions from compellingly metaphorical to ridiculously literal. It’s so obvious and drenched in schlocky melodrama, it ends up being laughable. Nothing about this story should be funny, but here we are, stifling snickers.

Our Call: The power of Christ compels you to SKIP IT.

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