THE DELIVERANCE. A horror that scares with its quality [REVIEW]

When demons threaten the peace and soul of an unfortunate family, only an inspired pastor can come to the rescue, performing a ritual called – brace yourselves – the Delivarence. This level of narrative construction is what “The Deliverance”, available on Netflix for a week now, offers – a knockoff of “The Exorcist“, ordered from a Chinese mail-order service.

As for the plot of “The Deliverance”, we’ve seen it dozens of times before – a family moves into an old house, and then something unsettling starts happening. A sinister figure appears at the boundary of wakefulness and dreams, and the youngest son begins talking to an imaginary friend. In the end, everything leads to the revelation of a demon’s presence, which the heroic mother must face with the help of the church. The Netflix film is based on real events from 2011 that took place in Indiana. A woman named Latoya Ammons, a single mother of three children, moved into a new house with her kids and her mother, which she believed to be haunted. Strange occurrences were observed in the house, culminating in alleged possession. Although the surrounding community was skeptical, a local priest performed exorcisms, and the whole situation concluded when the Ammons family moved out in 2012.

The entire case seems rather far-fetched – the alleged evidence of paranormal events is almost solely the testimony of Latoya Ammons and her children, regarding whose upbringing Social Services had serious concerns. The local police chief, who propelled the case into the spotlight, was known for his belief in supernatural phenomena, while the specialists working with the Ammons family in the fields of medicine and psychology noted Latoya’s tendency towards delusions and hallucinations, as well as a pattern of projecting her beliefs onto her children, who followed their mother’s narrative, possibly using the symptoms of possession as a defensive mechanism. Nevertheless, the case garnered enough attention to attract filmmakers.

The script for “The Deliverance”, written by Elijah Bynum and David Coggeshall (including “Orphan: First Kill”), was directed by Lee Daniels – not exactly a superstar, but no rookie either, as his “Precious” reached the Oscars, and “The Butler” with Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey was one of the more notable and quality voices revising Black history in the USA about a decade ago. What connects the two most important films in Daniels’ directorial résumé? They’re not horror films. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker clearly doesn’t have a feel for this genre, though he does understand social drama. Thus, when “The Deliverance” builds its intrigue around the family dynamic of Ebony, Alberta, and their three children, it works reasonably well. But the more the horror elements come into play, the more the film loses its way. It’s as if two films were pieced together – an intriguing family drama about a relationship between an alcoholic mother, a cancer-stricken ex-addict grandmother, and their lost children, combined with a clichéd haunted house horror. It’s a risky blend, attempting to fit within the current trend of socially-conscious horror films.

The artistic ambitions are also signaled by the cast – Glenn Close makes a proud appearance in a supporting role, and further down the line, we see Mo’Nique, an Oscar winner for her role in “Precious”. Also appearing is Caleb McLaughlin from “Stranger Things“, who unfortunately continues the tradition of less successful “solo” projects by the child actors from the Duffer brothers’ series. As for Close, her late career seems to have taken a rough turn. After “Albert Nobbs” and “The Wife”, it seemed she would continue to solidly punctuate her career with noble performances. However, following the disastrous “Hillbilly Elegy” – including her over-the-top, over-characterized, and overall “over-everything” role – came “The Deliverance”, where, ironically, we see her in a demonic incarnation, grotesquely and laughably transformed into a possessed victim.

The involvement of talented actors and Lee Daniels, a director known for tackling African-American issues in the U.S., suggests that at some point, someone thought “The Deliverance” could use the horror genre to address social issues, like the films of Jordan Peele. In fact, the character of Alberta, played by Close, is genuinely interesting at first – a white woman embedded in a Black community, battling age, cancer, and past addiction demons, while trying to help her daughter struggling with her own addiction. It’s a shame that the creators couldn’t weave this into the horror layer of the film. Once the horror faucet is turned on, Alberta’s character practically disappears, replaced by the stereotypical “tough grandma” figure. More broadly, the entire social drama thread is thrown out the window and fails to resonate within the horror language.

“The Deliverance” is simply tacky, and the suggested initial ambitions for serious psychological horror (in the first scenes, one might think Daniels was aiming to compete with Ari Aster and his “Hereditary“) make the cheap effects and lazy jump scares seem even sillier than if we had been dealing with an unambitious B-movie from the start. The drama is dull, first falling into the familiar rut of a troubled family story, then abandoning character psychology and ticking off the clichés of a possession tale that even last year’s “Exorcist” reboot looks creative in comparison. The story neither explores interesting themes nor engages even crudely. To top it off, the film leads to a clumsy moral conclusion that feels ripped from films associated with the Lux Veritatis Foundation and TV Trwam. The title is no accident – this drawn-out tale concludes with the message that if you believe in God, everything will be OK. The comparison to the classic 70s horror “The Exorcist” is repeatedly made, both within the film and outside it, but Daniels and company do almost everything Friedkin did five decades ago, only worse. This also applies to the message, which in “The Exorcist”, although rooted in Christianity, was ambivalent, rationalized, and tastefully presented. In “The Deliverance”, we get rhetoric along the lines of “if you don’t like the cross on the wall, Satan will possess you and you’ll regret it.”

It’s hard to even call “The Deliverance” an ambitious failure – it’s just a dreadful movie, practically a knockoff. The new Netflix horror is even worse than the unfortunate “The Woman in the Window” from a few years ago – and at least Joe Wright had production troubles as an excuse there. Here, there are no such excuses. Everyone involved in building this film’s story and bringing it to life did a terrible job, and “The Deliverance” is inept in a way that shouldn’t happen at this budget level. Fittingly, Daniels’ film is terrifying – but only in terms of quality.