As a director, Lee Daniels tends to get criticized for his over-the-top actions. Some of that is deserved, but the truth is that when he’s cooking at full steam, Daniels is a gifted director. “The Deliverance” is his sixth feature, and I’ve been a fan of three of them: “Precious” (2009), his unusual story of a disabled inner-city teen’s escape from her domestic hell; “The Paperboy” (2012), a gritty, disturbing Southern film; and “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (2021), a musical political biopic that, despite its flaws, did a great job of channeling the ferocity of its complex subject matter.
So when I say that “The Deliverance,” a demonic possession movie Daniels made for Netflix, is one of his over-the-top clichés, I’m not saying that it’s always Like that. But sometimes it is. And “The Deliverance” is not without Daniels’s interesting social undercurrents.
Set in Pittsburgh in 2011, the film follows a family who moves into a house that immediately shows signs of being haunted. Filmmaker's Note: never The use of flies swarming around the room to demonstrate the presence of dark forces was over-the-top and over-the-top in The Amityville Horror (1979), and is more conventional now. In Deliverance, the whole supernatural thing—the devil—is something you’ve seen many times before, and therefore less scary than it should be.
The part of the movie that is worth watching is its portrayal of the family, which is very Andra Day, who played Billie Holiday with aplomb, plays Ebony, a single mother struggling to raise three kids—teenagers Shante (Demi Singleton) and Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) and young Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins)—with little money and a long-standing nervousness. (She’s separated from her husband, who’s on a mission in Iraq.) The horror movie heroine is usually an innocent woman trapped, but before “Salvation” gets to the demonic possession part, the film focuses on Ebony’s demons: her willingness to beat her children, her tendency to lash out in a hateful, rage-filled way at everyone around her, even the devil. (“I can’t take this,” she screams on the top of the basement stairs, flies swarming around her. “I can’t take this.”) “If there's someone down there, I'll hit you!”)
Ebony, whose moodiness landed her in prison, has a drinking problem, but these days she seems more sober than not. But even when she’s not drinking, she slaps Dre in the mouth at the dinner table for talking about wanting milk, accusing her of being too cheap to buy it (she says he’s lactose intolerant, but she’s never seen a doctor about it). Is Ebony the movie’s counterpart to Marie, the brutal mother played by Mo’Nique in Precious ? Far from it, but there’s an overlap. She’s a mother who’s been brutalized at times, almost to the point of cruelty. She’s also overprotective, taking out her rage on a teenage bully on the street next door.
What Daniels wants us to see is that Ebony is a conduit for the oppressive forces—economic and racial—that have damaged her life and turned it into a daily pressure cooker. The film makes no excuses for her, but it shows us that her demons intertwine with those of society. Day, with her wretched expression and her immense energy, portrays her as a clever mix of swashbuckler and victim. And Mo’Nique is there—she plays the social services officer who oversees Ebony like a stern detective, looking for any sign that she’s doing something wrong and should therefore take her children away.
Despite Day’s rage, the showpiece performance in “Salvation” is Glenn Close’s as Bertha, Ebony’s white mother, who has come to live with them. Bertha is a repentant drug addict who has found Christ and is undergoing chemotherapy, which has left her with nothing but a stubble on top. But she wears a wig of bright blonde curls, goes out in revealing shirts, and flirts wildly. Bertha is at war with her daughter, but she’s also, you know, caresIt's fun to see Glenn Close pull off a well-thought-out performance, even if the character makes her “Hillbilly Elegy” grandmother look mediocre.
The kids start doing weird things. Dre knocks on the basement door and then just stands there like a zombie. At school, the three engage in some weird acting out involving bodily fluids. Is this a projection of their domestic abuse? Or are they being possessed by demons? Yes and yes, that’s supposed to be the plot of the movie. But once the demon actually takes over, and the exorcist (oops, I meant demon) starts casting demons out of the basement, the movie starts to fall apart. The MessengerThe character “Devil” (played by Onganui Ellis Taylor from “The Originals”) shows up, all to perform an exorcism (sorry, I meant enoughIn this episode, Daniels reaches into the bag of air-flying, skin-shining, spider-limb-breaking tricks that have propelled the genre forward for decades. Surprisingly, Ebony ends up confronting herself, literally facing her own demons. But it turns out those demons were only somewhat interesting when they were real.
