Director – Lee Daniels, Screenplay – Elijah Bynum & David Coggeshall, Producers – Todd Crites, Lee Daniels, Jackson Nguyen, Tucker Tooley & Pamela Oas Williams, Photography – Eli Arenson, Music – Lucas Vidal, Visual Effects Supervisor – Dennis Berardi, Visual Effects – Herne Hill (Supervisor – Ayo Burgess), Special Effects Supervisor – Raymond Tasillo, Makeup Effects – Jason Collins-Autonomous F/X, Inc., Production Design – Steve Saklad. Production Company – Tucker Tooley Entertainment/Lee Daniels Entertainment/Turn Left Productions.
Cast
Andra Day (Ebony Jackson), Glenn Close (Alberta), Anthony B. Jenkins (Andre Jackson), Caleb McLaughlin (Nate Jackson), Demi Singleton (Shante Jackson), Aunjanue Ellis Taylor (Reverend Bernice James), Mo’nique (Cynthia Henry), Omar Epps (Melvin), Miss Lawrence (Asia), Colleen Camp (Dr Hoffstedder)
Plot
Philadelphia, 2011. Ebony Jackson has moved into a new house. Her estranged husband is serving in Iraq, while she is left struggling with bills and raising their three children. At the same time, her mother Alberta moves in. The children all begin to exhibit disturbing behaviours and there are unexplained noises and phenomena in the house. Ebony then has to deal with social services who believe that she is a bad mother and is abusing the children. She reluctantly accepts the only other possibility offered by a minister – that the house is inhabited by an evil presence.
The Deliverance is said to be based on a real-life incident where that occurred in Gary, Indiana in 2011 where Latoya Adams, her mother and three children experienced sinister phenomena in their house and the three children became possessed. An exorcism was eventually performed and they moved to another house, while the original house was eventually bulldozed. In its efforts to convince us that all of this happened, the film even goes so far to include end title cards showing us pictures of the real-life Latoya Adams and the house where the incident took place.
I have reached a point with Possession and Exorcism films where I feel that the genre is tapped out. There have been few to no new or original moves since The Exorcist came out fifty years ago. It is a genre rehashing the same themes of almost always Catholic priests chanting rituals; the possesee in cracked face mouthing obscenities and manifesting various phenomena and (as here) climbing up the walls. My lack of enthusiasm for yet another film churning through the overly familiar tropes is a good part of the reason I put off watching The Deliverance.
Andra Day and son Anthony B. Jenkins
Lee Daniels is an African-American filmmaker who has gained reasonable acclaim as director with works such as Precious (2009) for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, The Paperboy (2012), The Butler (2013) and The United States vs Billie Holiday (2021). In addition, Daniels served as creator of the tv series Empire (2015-20).
Settling in to watch, I was surprised as The Deliverance does do something different with the Possession and Exorcism genre. Not really in terms of altering the basics but Lee Daniels has transferred the cast and setting to a modern African-American family in an impoverished neighbourhood. It is a world where solo mother Andra Day is struggling with bills, has to threaten the corner drug dealers for harassing her son and is in imminent danger of having her children taken away by social services who believe that she is abusing them. Amid this, the religious backdrop is no longer the exorcism genre’s default faith of Catholicism but the local gospel church and where the exorcist is not a priest but an itinerant evangelist.
Lee Daniels does a very good job of portraying the corner of society where the film is set. He is serviced by great performances from his two lead actresses. Andra Day creates a complex character, both fighting for her survival and yet equally flawed – you are quite taken aback when you see her slapping her kids. The one name that surprises you altogether is Glenn Close. Close was big in the 1980s in films such as The Big Chill (1983), Jagged Edge (1985), Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and especially Fatal Attraction (1987), even as Cruella de Ville in 101 Dalmatians (1996). She has been nominated for an Academy Award eight times but has never won. Here at age 77, she goes for broke, playing a white mother with a sharp tongue and a taste for Black men. It is both eye-opening to see her as a septuagenarian flirting with Omar Epps nearly 25 years her junior and equally with hair unglamorously shaven to a fuzz by chemotherapy. It is a harsh and unglamorous performance that many another actress would have balked at.
(front to back) Social worker Mo’nique, Andra Day and her mother Glenn Close
This is certainly a far stronger attempt to add diversity to the exorcism genre than anything that appeared in The Exorcist: Believer (2023). Lee Daniels does such a strong job in evoking this world – one clearly familiar to him – that the slide over into horror, which comes in the second half of the film, is far more perfunctory and by the book. And it is not one that he does a whole lot to redeem from the cliches – there is still the possessed with glowing eyes, taunting and displaying knowledge of other’s people pasts and secrets, even managing to manifest as dead people for some length of time. From about the point that Anthony B. Jenkins crawls back up the wall, The Deliverance becomes exceedingly predictable.
The problem I have with The Deliverance and its claim to be telling a true story is the same one I have with films like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Conjuring films, The Exorcism in Amarillo and The Pope’s Exorcist. And that is that to accept them as true stories, you are required to uphold an evangelical Christian (or at least Catholic) view of the world where demons are real and that they are capable of influencing people’s behaviour. I don’t subscribe to this point of view.
And if you don’t hold to the actuality of possession that leaves The Deliverance in an uncomfortable position when it comes to explanations for what is going on. The film goes some way to try and convince us that Andra Day is not guilty of neglecting and abusing her children. However, when you take any explanation of demonic possession out of the equation that seems the only logical explanation left. Is it too out of the pale to have an explanation of a mother struggling with finances, a broken home and having to move multiple times who sees her children acting up in the midst of this and latches onto the ramblings of an itinerant preacher about it all being down to an evil spirit in the house they were living?
The Deliverance is not related to nor should be confused with the classic wilderness survival horror Deliverance (1972).
(Winner for Best Supporting Actress (Glenn Close) at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
