The Deliverance (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

In 2011, Latoya Ammons moved into a Gary, Indiana, rental house with her family, and they soon experienced strange and disturbing phenomena that led them to contact a priest, who exorcised the house. After multiple attempts, the family relocated to Indianapolis, where the suspected haunting activity did not pursue them. The story gained notoriety in 2014 (when I heard about it, having moved to nearby Michigan City that year) when the Indianapolis Star published a story and photos of the alleged haunting. Notably, the police chief believed that supernatural events were indeed happening in the "Demon House," adding credibility to the tale. Naysayers flocked, criticizing Latoya for faking it to avoid house payments, to cover up child abuse, and to gain money for the publicity. The whole affair smacks of racism and classism, but the question is really who stood to gain (and what) from the hubbub, a question that leaves more concerns than answers in its wake.

When Lee Daniels was announced to head up a dramatic adaptation of these events, I was thrilled. Daniels has a very specific aesthetic and oeuvre, and like his style or not, he never holds back his punches. He also demonstrates a keen eye when it comes to moments of slippage and fluidity in intersectional social problems, as seen in Precious, The Paperboy, Shadowboxer, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, and even that odd ensemble piece The Butler. He'd surely handle the material with sensitive care around issues of addiction, poverty, racialized housing, and child abuse, while dramatizing it with appropriately suburban Gothic flair. Right?

Well, no, actually. The Deliverance, as awfully titled as it is, manages to offer a lot of key moments that all deserve special attention -- including visits from a troublesome CPS agent (Mo'Nique) and more -- and skirts them in order to deliver (ha ha) what it thinks are profound and effective scares. Daniels doesn't know how to craft a horror atmosphere and maintain it for two hours, and that ineptitude is on full display here. A few scares are fun, but they are all too familiar and most are outright stolen tropes from other, better possession films. Characters clambering up walls, bodies contorting with grisly sound effects, children spewing profanities ad nauseam; it's all here and then some, with pedestrian effects and weak follow-through on what should be a waking nightmare.

But the horror in this story isn't just what Daniels pulls out of his magic hat in the film's latter half. Its first half has some really gripping interracial family drama rooted in intergenerational trauma and attempts to overcome institutional oppression. The film works best in the first half, when Daniels clearly knows he's one of the best at what he does. His incredible cast, including Andra Day, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and Glenn Close all at the tops of their games, pull no stops in their raw, often brutal encounters with each other. Day, playing Ebony Jackson as the stand-in for a much-fictionalized Ammons, carries most of the film on her capable shoulders, injecting gravitas and earned weight to her fight with the demons in her life: addiction, jobs, finances, supporting her unconventional family. She's raising three kids alone until her mother, recently diagnosed with cancer, moves in with them. Her mother (Close, in a gobsmacking performance) is a chain-smoking born-again Christian who flirts too much with the young men at her clinic, and seems intent to atone for her bad motherhood by being a present and mindful grandmother. It would be a lot for anyone to handle, and did I mention that Ebony is alcoholic?

I expected Daniels and his writers to lean into the family drama as the source of possible horror. Are the hauntings products of Day's drunken haze? Is she the one abusing her children, not ghosts or demons? Is the stress of their domesticity leeching the lives of her children away despite her best efforts? When will the next child be struck, the next appliance futz out, the next knock at the door take away her family? Daniels knows melodrama and he can deftly communicate the complex intangibles of oppressive -isms, and he clearly wanted this story to feed off that, making it the Midwestern Gothic version of OJ Simpson's crime in its acute intersection of social ills. Let the supernatural stuff go by the wayside, like in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, wherein the mere possibility of supernatural horror slides under the audience's consciousness even as its main plot takes place in a courtroom.

Alas, the producers or Netflix or whoever seem to have thwarted his efforts. The film raises clear flags in moments when Daniels obviously had his vision wrenched from his grasp, usually when the "scares" occur with unfortunately underperforming effects and efficacy. By the time it's obvious The Deliverance is about a literal demon preying on Ebony and her family, the grotesque appeal of the film wanes as it teeters into rote generic steps, plodding safely to its most obvious denouement. I suspect the kids in a normal Daniels film would face much more devastating threats in the real world than against demons climbing up from hell, and we'd have a much more satisfying film had he been able to focus in on what he does best. Instead, we're given a middling effort that still is very much worth watching, if only to see Glenn Close sewing in tracks on Andra Day's head!