THE DELIVERANCE (2024)

Studio:   Netflix
Director: Lee Daniels
Writer:   David Coggeshall, Elijah Bynum
Producer: Lee Daniels, Tucker Tooley, Pamela Oas Williams, Jackson Nguyen, Todd Crites
Stars:    Andra Day, Glenn Close, Mo'Nique, Anthony B. Jenkins, Miss Lawrence, Demi Singleton, Tasha Smith, Omar Epps, Caleb McLaughlin, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

Review Score:

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Summary:

An alcoholic mother suspected of child abuse confronts her family's demons when her youngest son becomes possessed.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

With her estranged husband overseas in Iraq, struggling alcoholic Ebony Jackson moves into a rundown house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her teenage son Nate, teenage daughter Shante, youngest son Andre, and cancer-stricken mother Alberta in 2011. Additionally stressed by financial problems, Ebony regularly feuds with her mother and physically disciplines her children for perceived disrespect, too.

At the clinic where she receives chemotherapy, Alberta begins a fling with attending nurse Melvin. Alberta is surprised to learn her daughter has been secretly paying for Alberta's treatment ever since her insurance ran out. The revelation aids in strengthening Alberta and Ebony's strained relationship.

Nate confronts his drunken mother about money she took from his closet. Nate tells Ebony he's been saving money sent by his father so he can move away from her, which prompts a shoving match between the two of them. The fight ends when Andre enters the room and trips on a dropped baseball bat, injuring himself.

Department of Child Services officer Cynthia Henry visits the house. Seeing bruises on all three siblings, some of which came from corner boy bullies and other incidents, Cynthia warns Ebony about potentially losing her kids due to suspected abuse. When Cynthia leaves, a woman later revealed to be Reverend Bernice James is seen observing the house from a car across the street.

Ebony hosts a birthday party for Shante. During the party, Ebony finds Andre, who had previously begun exhibiting unusual behavior, banging his head against the cellar door while entranced. Andre tells his mother he was talking to an invisible presence named Trey, who supposedly lives in a hole downstairs, but sometimes whispers worrisome things to Andre from his bedroom closet.

That night, Alberta is drawn to startling noises in Andre's bedroom. Alberta finds the three children cowering while claiming a confused Ebony threw them against the wall.

Bernice James secretly follows Alberta the next day when she drives the kids to school. During their respective classes, Shante menstruates at a choir rehearsal, Nate has an aggressive confrontation with his teacher, and Andre defecates in front of classmates before flinging and eating his feces.

Hospital tests find nothing out of the ordinary with the three children. However, a hospital administrator expresses her suspicion that Ebony is beating her kids. Alberta expresses the same concern, prompting Ebony to remind Alberta of the similar abuse she suffered growing up. Later, Ebony finds Nate attempting to drown Andre in the bathtub.

Cynthia Henry returns to the house. Ebony tells her the children are hearing things and she believes the house is making them sick. Cynthia demands to see the kids, but Alberta threatens her with a baseball bat. When Cynthia leaves, Bernice is seen outside the house once again.

Alberta appeals to her church's pastor to do something about the evil haunting the house. Claiming her church doesn't engage in such activities, the pastor turns away Alberta.

Bernice confronts Ebony outside of a bar. Identifying herself as an apostle in Jesus's name, Bernice confirms there is an evil spirit in Ebony's house, but she wanted to verify her suspicions before meeting Ebony in person.

Bernice recounts how 20 years ago, a family who belonged to Bernice's church also had a son become possessed while living inside the same home. The family turned to Bernice to perform the "deliverance," a form of exorcism that calls specifically to Jesus, to banish the demon, but Bernice wasn't strong enough to be successful. The mother went on to behead her possessed son with an ax before strangling her daughter and hanging herself. Bernice reveals the possessed boy's name was Trey, whom the entity now impersonates to manipulate Andre. Ebony refuses to believe Bernice's story.

Alberta confronts an unseen presence in the house. When Ebony returns home, she finds a crucifix on fire and her mother lying dead on the floor.

After police process the crime scene, which Cynthia personally investigates, Ebony drives away with Andre, Nate, and Shante. When she sees Andre's eyes turn black in the backseat, Ebony rushes into a nearby diner for help. The incident leads to Ebony being given a psychiatric evaluation while her three children are put into foster care.

Upon being released, Ebony goes back to Bernice for help. In the meantime, Cynthia witnesses Andre break the restraints he was put in to prevent convulsions, crawl backwards up a wall, and taunt Cynthia with the name of her dead son.

Disguised in hospital scrubs, Ebony sneaks Andre out of the Churchill Behavioral Health Center with Bernice driving their getaway car. Ebony takes Andre back to the house where Bernice begins performing the deliverance. During the ritual, Andre's demon takes the frightening form of a mutated Alberta, among other supernatural occurrences. At the same time, Nate and Shante undergo their own possessions in their respective group home rooms.

The demonic presence kills Bernice. The demon then turns into Ebony's doppelganger as it forces her to painfully contort. Ebony ultimately pleads for Jesus and begins speaking in tongues as the demon is finally banished from all three children.

Now a believer, Cynthia vows to help Ebony get her children back in the aftermath. Ebony gives Cynthia a cross pendant while commenting that Jesus can help Cynthia like he helped her.

Six months later, Ebony reunites with her kids. On a drive back to their previous city, Philadelphia, Ebony excites the children by revealing she plans to work things out with their father.

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Review:

Upon hearing of a notoriously haunted home in Gary, Indiana, paranormal investigation personality Zak Bagans purchased the property, supposedly sight unseen, and turned some of its story into the 2018 documentary "Demon House" (review here). Before Bagans bought it, the house belonged to Latoya Ammons, who became something of a local sensation with her claims, some of which were corroborated by authorities, that a supernatural presence terrorized her family until they finally fled.

Early on in "Demon House," Bagans attempts to interview Ammons and her mother about their eerie encounters, but the women refuse on the grounds Bagans could bring the evil entity back to them since he had been inside the home. Coincidentally, the documentary later adds that Ammons and her mother were working with a Hollywood producer on adapting their story, which skeptics might suspect had more to do with staying out of Bagans's conflicting project than fear of being cursed again.

"The Deliverance" appears to be that dramatized account of "true events" Ammons was attached to. It apparently wasn't cheap, either. According to a Deadline article, Netflix beat out six other bidders for the film by ponying up $65 million to cover the $30 million production budget plus additional buyouts. I cannot fathom why anyone would pay a pretty penny for the rights to a specific story only to then change the details that make that story specific, yet that's what happens with "The Deliverance."

Speculation suggests the movie moved out of Indiana in favor of a Pittsburgh location perhaps because Pennsylvania offered a better tax credit. I can't come up with a reason why "The Deliverance" is set in 2011 when the Ammons family was actually affected in 2014 though, because what difference do those three years make? The main names are changed too, even though Latoya Ammons has an associate producer credit and epilogue text devoted to her. It's bizarre for the filmmakers to alter inconsequential facts to render true story identifiers extinct, yet keep themselves chained to the tedious domestic drama behind it all when they could have been far more entertaining with something totally original instead.

Ebony Jackson has it hard. Since her estranged husband is overseas in Iraq, she's effectively a single mother. With her teenage son Nate, teenage daughter Shante, and youngest son Andre, she just moved from Philly to Pittsburgh into a rundown home infested with flies, strange smells, and a dead cat rotting in the basement. Her difficult mother Alberta moved in as well, as if Ebony didn't already have her hands full. They're literally full too, as she's illustrated as a multitask master furiously folding laundry while her shoulder pins a persistent creditor's phone call to her annoyed ear.

It's no wonder Ebony drinks. Alcohol isn't an excuse for her abusive actions, although it is a chief reason why she's short tempered with her children, and plays a part in physically punishing her underprivileged kids. When mom isn't laying hands on them, neighborhood corner boys bully both brothers. Meanwhile, sister Shante commiserates with their disappeared dad through texts typed out on a cellphone's broken screen.

For homebound movie night, everyone watches that favorite family classic, "Valley of the Dolls." The Jacksons watch it so often, Nate and Andre quietly laugh at the ladies reciting each line from memory while doing each other's hair. Even that ends in an argument, however, as does a birthday party where Ebony imbibes too much booze and Andre's increasingly odd behavior finally comes out in the open.

After an incredibly indulgent 40 minutes of setting up this stereotypical scenario, approximately 30 minutes longer than any average viewer needs to understand this is a put-upon family living in poverty, a smack to its skull reminds "The Deliverance" it's supposed to include supernatural horror in its overserved helping of maudlin melodrama. Ebony finds Andre banging his face against the cellar door. He says an invisible man named Trey tells him to do bad things, and if there's anything we know about common fright film tropes, it's that imaginary friends are definitely a doorway to danger.

At this point, there's still a full hour to go in the movie. Empty minutes aren't going to fill themselves, and there are only so many scenes we can stomach where everyone calls each other "bitch" over and over again, so "The Deliverance" fills in that space with secondary characters who don't serve any critical functions. Omar Epps is high in the credits, but low on the onscreen totem pole as the partner in a go-nowhere romance with Glenn Close, who may or may not have been originally written to be a white woman, for a total of two scenes. Mo'Nique gets more real estate as a DCS case worker who's consistently concerned about Ebony's children, yet when one looks back on what she actually does in the film, you'll see only momentary bumps in the road without her becoming a true obstacle for Ebony or a facilitator of freedom for the kids.

Taking longer than any other parent in this familiar cinematic conflict, Ebony eventually accepts her son is demonically possessed and turns to a woman for help. The woman isn't a priest. She's a self-proclaimed "apostle, prophet, evangelist" who goes where God sends her, whatever that means. Not being part of the Church, she can't perform an exorcism. She can perform "the deliverance," which is basically the same thing, just with extra mumbo-jumbo about Jesus Christ being the intercessor summoned to cast out demonic influence. Cue the standard scenes of growling in deep voices, contorting backwards, levitating, etc. If you've seen it in any other exorcism movie, you'll see it here, too.

On the surface, one might think the movie's message about Jesus being both the salvation and the salve for fixing a fractured family provides an honorable ending. Except it ignores reality for Ebony to rescue her family not by accepting responsibility for her role in creating their situation, but to gift her with a shortcut by having a sudden renewal of faith save the day.

Director Lee Daniels initially keeps some of the violence affecting the siblings ambiguous. Maybe Ebony beats her kids in drunken stupors. Maybe something unseen behind a closed door is at fault. That's a problematic suggestion in its own right, but Daniels makes matters worse when his movie definitively declares a demon unfairly targeted the family for no real reason other than they moved into the wrong house at the wrong time.

I'll say the same thing about "The Deliverance" that I said about "Demon House." In presenting a poor family confronting emotional trauma, cyclical patterns of abuse, and dire dynamics inside a house whose dilapidated condition contributes to declining health, it's in poor taste at best and irresponsible at worst to pin the blame on an imaginary being rather than the true causes of domestic violence and impoverished living. "The Deliverance" is already clunkily constructed as a routine drama populated by people the plot doesn't need, haphazardly shoehorned horror elements recycled from dozens of other demonic possession yarns, and characterizations that are cartoonish for how aggressively exaggerated they are. Thoughtless takeaways only add to the bad flavor left in your mouth, made worse by the nearly two hours it takes to grimacingly gulp everything down.

Review Score: 30

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