By Dustin Rowles | Film | September 6, 2024 |
Lee Daniels’ The Deliverance is one of the more preposterous films I’ve ever seen. It’s reminiscent of a season of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story compressed into 90 minutes, which is to say: It starts to lose coherence about 20 minutes in and completely derails about halfway through. Unfortunately, that leaves another 45 minutes of increasingly baffling nonsense.
The story revolves around Ebony (Andra Day), a struggling single mother who moves her family into a new home along with her mother, Alberta (Glenn Close). Soon, she and her children start behaving strangely and sometimes violently. Cynthia (Mo’Nique), a woman from Child Protective Services, believes that Ebony is abusing her children, while another woman, Reverend Bernice James (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), knows the truth: The house is haunted and has already claimed one family. The Reverend wants to perform a “the deliverance” on one of Ebony’s possessed sons, Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins). This process sounds a lot like an exorcism, only there’s apparently no clerical intermediary between the devil and Jesus himself.
The script, from David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum, is a haphazard collection of haunted house and exorcism movie tropes, and Lee Daniels amplifies the absurdity to a level of extreme silliness. It’s difficult to categorize this as a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie, but it certainly provokes laughter. If you’re not rolling your eyes, you’re likely guffawing at the sheer implausibility. That doesn’t mean that The Deliverance is intentionally funny; it’s just that it’s too preposterous not to elicit some amusement. It might even be entertaining to watch with a lively audience, but it fails dramatically to function as an effective horror film.
That said, Glenn Close is reason enough to watch, as she inhabits something akin to a dolled-up version of her Hillbilly Elegy character, a woman who is white trash in its purest, uncut form, a woman so white trash that she flaunts her cleavage and hits on a male nurse during chemotherapy treatments. The Glenn Close from Elegy reminded me a lot of my Me Maw. This Glenn Close character is more like my Me Maw after she put in her teeth and got hoochie’d up for a night on the town (and by “a night on the town,” I mean drinking from bottles in paper bags in the common area of a trailer park because that’s how we do it in Bumblefuck, AR). To avoid spoiling too much, at one point, Glenn Close also turns into the White Devil, and if the drugs you took before starting the film have not kicked in yet, demon Glenn Close should do the trick. That’s true even if you didn’t take drugs.
The Deliverance is a bewildering film, and while I wish I could say that the performances of Andra Day, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, and Mo’Nique elevate it, it’d be a lie. Denzel and Daniel Day couldn’t do anything for this script, but at least Glenn Close is having fun leaning in. While she cannot transcend the material, she does the next best thing: Meets it where it is, rolls around on the floor with it, and maybe even humps its leg.
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