As a filmmaker, Lee Daniels tends to get slagged off on for being flamboyantly garish and over-the-top. Some of that is deserved, but the truth is that when he’s cooking on all cylinders Daniels is a gifted filmmaker. “The Deliverance” is the sixth feature he has directed, and I’ve been a fan of three of them: “Precious” (2009), his extraordinary tale of a stunted inner-city teenager’s escape from her domestic hell; “The Paperboy” (2012), a bold and unnerving Southern gothic noir; and “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (2021), a musical-political biopic that, while flawed, did a superb job of channeling its subject’s complicated ferocity.
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So when I say that “The Deliverance,” a demonic-possession movie that Daniels made for Netflix, is one of his kitschy-extreme schlock extravaganzas, I’m not saying that he’s always like that. But sometimes he is. And “The Deliverance” is not without its socially provocative Daniels undercurrents.
The film is set in Pittsburgh in 2011, and it’s about a family that moves into a house that immediately shows signs of being haunted. Memo to filmmakers: Never use flies buzzing around a room to establish the presence of dark forces. It was overly corny and telegraphed in “The Amityville Horror,” in 1979, and it’s an even hoarier device now. In “The Deliverance,” almost everything to do with the supernatural — i.e., the devil — is something you’ve seen way too many times before, and is therefore a lot less scary than it ought to be.
The watchable part of the movie is its portrayal of the family, which is very Lee Daniels. Andra Day, so potent as Billie Holiday, plays Ebony, a single mother struggling to raise three kids — teenage Shante (Demi Singleton) and Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) and young Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins) — without much money, and with nerves that frayed long ago. (She’s separated from her husband, who is doing a tour of duty in Iraq.) Usually, the heroine of a horror film is a besieged innocent, but before “The Deliverance” gets to the possession part it focuses on the demons in Ebony: her willingness to hit her kids, and her tendency to lash out, in a way that’s nasty and full of rage, at everyone around her, even the devil. (Standing at the top of the basement stairs, where those flies are buzzing around, she shouts, “If somebody’s down there, I’ll fuck you up!” )
Ebony, whose temper has gotten her jail time, struggles with alcohol but seems, these days, more sober than not. Yet even when she isn’t drinking, we see her smack Dre in the mouth at the dinner table because he spoke up about wanting milk, accusing her of being too cheap to buy it (she says that he’s lactose intolerant but she’s never been to a doctor about it). Is Ebony the film’s equivalent of Mary, the monster mother played by Mo’Nique in “Precious”? Far from it, yet there’s an overlap. She’s a mother who’s been coarsened, at times, into meanness. She’s also quite protective, unleashing her hellion wrath on a teen bully down the block.
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What Daniels wants us to see is that Ebony is a conduit for forces of oppression — economic and racial — that have dogged her life and turned it into a daily pressure cooker. The movie makes no excuses for her, but it does show us that her demons overlap with society’s. And Day, with a face of expressive misery and the energy of an imploding firecracker, portrays her as a shrewd fusion of harridan and victim. Mo’Nique is actually on hand here — she plays the DCS officer who oversees Ebony like a prim detective, looking for any sign that she’s messing up and should therefore have her kids taken away.
For all of Day’s searing anger, the showboat performance in “The Deliverance” is the one given by Glenn Close as Berta, Ebony’s white mother, who has come to live with them. Berta is a reformed junkie who found Jesus and is now going through chemo, which has left her head with nothing but scraggly wisps on top. But she wears wigs of showy blonde curls and goes out in revealing tops, flirting like mad. Berta is at war with her daughter, but she also, you know, cares . And it’s fun to see Glenn Close cut loose, in what is actually a rather well-thought-out performance, even if the character makes her Mamaw in “Hillbilly Elegy” look understated.
The kids start doing weird things. Dre bangs on the basement door and then stands there like a zombie. At school, all three engage in a bizarre acting out that involves bodily fluids. Is this a projection of their suffering from domestic abuse? Or are they being taken over by spirits? Yes and yes, and that’s supposed to be the film’s intrigue. But once the devil actually takes over, and an exorcist (excuse me, I meant an apostle , played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor from “Origin”) shows up, all in order to perform an exorcism (excuse me, I meant a deliverance , which turns out to be the exact same thing), Daniels reaches into the bag of levitating, skin-mottling, cracking-spider-limb tricks that have been propelling this genre for decades. The twist is that Ebony ends up squaring off against herself, literally facing down her own demons. But it turns out those demons were only halfway interesting when they were real.
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