The Deliverance Review – Fab Cast in So-So ‘Exorcist’ Style Film
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“I had to cast out the demon. I had to do what we call the deliverance.”
“Like in The Exorcist movie”
“No, I don’t do no exorcisms”
The creators of the 2024 horror-thriller The Deliverance slip in a clever nod to the OG of demonic possession movies through the above exchange between two pivotal characters and try to set themselves apart from the hordes of other exorcism films. But the thing is, The Deliverance is very much an exorcist-style horror flick, except that it takes a lot of time to build up to the supernatural disturbances and focuses on a single Black American mom struggling to run her house with three kids, a cancer-stricken mother, and an alcohol problem.
Directed by Lee Daniels, The Deliverance stars Andra Day as Ebony, the single mom with three kids — Shante (Demi Singleton), Nate (Caleb McLaughlin), and her youngest son Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins). Glenn Close plays Ebony’s mother, Alberta, who has moved in with the family to their new place where an evil presence infects the children’s minds.
With an almost two-hour runtime, The Deliverance unfolds like a solid psychological movie about Ebony’s fraught relationships with her mom and kids, exacerbated by their financial troubles. In fact, if Lee Daniels and co-writers David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum had chosen to keep this story free from supernatural horrors, it would’ve been a much grittier film about a broken family trying to overcome their personal demons, rather than literal demons unleashed by Satan who needs a whipping from Lord Jesus himself. Thus comes the second half, where you see the usual possessed kids crawling up ceilings, contorting their bodies, cracking their bones in inhuman ways, and spewing venomous nonsense. “The Pope’s Exorcist” also featured similar tropes, but had a stronger back-story for both its demon and its exorcist.
Andra Day is effortlessly convincing as Ebony, a fierce working mom who finds herself in a power struggle at home with her own mother over how to raise her kids. A large theme of the film is the subtle (or not so subtle) racism Ebony faces at institutions like schools and hospitals over her capabilities as a single Black American mother. When her children act out at school, indulging in bizarre, disturbing behavior, Ebony is essentially blamed for creating a stressful environment for her children at home. Anthony B. Jenkins, who plays Ebony’s youngest child, Andre, is the most affected by the evil entity in their new home, and the child actor is fantastic in his creepy scenes.
The cast of The Deliverance is undoubtedly good in their roles; however, for a horror film, it doesn’t break any new ground and instead delivers a very standard, clichéd climax, with mild scares throughout its runtime. It’s the non-supernatural bits that tend to be a lot more unsettling and uncomfortable in this Lee Daniels movie.
Rating: 6 on 10. You can watch “The Deliverance” on Netflix.
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