Origin (2024)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Ava DuVernay is at her best with real life stories grappling with social structures and widespread injustices, and she tends to make provocative statements for the present rooted in careful consideration of history. Her most recent film, Origin, was released with little fanfare over a year ago, but I'm so glad to have finally seen it, ambitious and unusual a narrative as it is. Essentially, it's a biopic depicting the life and theories developed by Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste. How do you turn an academic scholar's life and ideas into a narrative? It's a tough question, and I can scarcely think of many that would take on such a task, but DuVernay's screenplay and direction make the case for a brilliant, daring new biographical film subgenre.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson enduring a series of personal crises while attempting to fulfill her editor's demands. She needs to get another book out, especially one that could deal with ongoing, increasing crises in the United States. The murder of Trayvon Martin spurs her editor (Blair Underwood) to pressure her to write about the hot topic as he sees her as uniquely capable to speak to a hurting nation. Wilkerson has her trepidations, and she explicitly describes her method as needing to "be inside the story" which will require time. Much like our experience of reading Wilkerson's real life writings or even approaching this dense, multifaceted film will take time and perseverance.

Though it's nominally an "adaptation" of Wilkerson's work Caste, Origin is more accurately a biographical snapshot of Wilkerson's personal life and professional interest in her subject matter at the time of composition than it is a dramatization of her thesis and research itself. Family trials beset her, including tragedies involving her mother (Emily Yancy) and husband (Jon Bernthal) that compel her to rely ever more on herself, her work, and the voice she needs to put to words regarding pain in the world around her. Her tribulations provide valuable insight into her ideas, allowing her to see Martin's murder not as the result of racism on its own, but rather in fact as a much broader, more invisible system at work in the US and around the globe.

Anyone familiar with Wilkerson's work knows what I'm talking about, and if you haven't, I'm not going to summarize it here. Suffice it to say that racism in fact is more a symptom than a problem, and resorting to racism to explain something as phenomenologically pervasive as the murdering of innocent young Black men is in fact a restrictive lens. But, as we all learned back in the day from Reading Rainbow, you shouldn't just take my word for it. Read her material and watch the film. DuVernay's adept screenplay masterfully weaves its way through Wilkerson's main theoretical pillars with aplomb even as it invites and encourages us to learn more on our own. Tying the violent aftermath of American slavery to Nazi war crimes against humanity and the degrading brutality of India's caste system, Wilkerson discovers and presents compelling evidence that ideologically link systemic systems of oppression, despite the naysayers (dramatized in a notable dinner scene, as Connie Nielsen attempts to challenge Ellis-Taylor on her intended scholarship). 

Formally, the film offers as much to compel viewers as it does to instruct and dramatize Wilkerson's work. DuVernay's cinematographer views everything in 16mm film which sidesteps the common pitfall of historical films using contrived lenses or color schemes to indicate alternate settings in time and place. Jumping between examples could make the film lurch uncomfortably, but the filmmakers keep the form consistent, helping us connect the daring thesis on visual terms as well as cerebral. Aurally hushed, the film feels intimate and tactile, like we're poring over historical records in a library alongside our protagonist, providing the scholarly insight room to strike us with awe and the actors room to nail us with pitch-perfect melodrama to help move the story along. Bernthal and Ellis-Taylor are exellent, and Niecy Nash even pops in for a few surprisingly intense and tender scenes as Wilkerson's cousin. One scene stuck out to me as both annoying and dispiritingly obvious -- if you know, you know, but it's when Wilkerson calls a plumber (Nick Offerman) to stop her basement from leaking and he arrives with a MAGA hat proudly on his head -- and I wish the filmmakers had made a more nuanced attempt to feel urgent or relevant. But as a dramatic account of astonishing journalism and the fraught process of crafting contemporary social theory, Origin is as poetic, contemplative, and emotionally and intellectually devastating as any award-bait films in recent memory. Weird, sure, and not always entertaining, but staunchly accessible, brave, and important.

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!