The Super Powered Fancast

The Deliverance

Netflix

Written by David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum

Directed by Lee Daniels

Starring Andra Day, Glenn Close, Anthony B. Jenkins, Caleb McLaughlin, Demi Singleton, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Mo’Nique, Omar Epps, Miss Lawrence, Javion Allen and Todd Anthony

Rated R

An Indiana family discovers strange, demonic occurrences that convince them and their community that the house is a portal to hell.

First question I had at the end of watching this film was simple; Lee Daniels. Who hurt you?

I didn’t ask this question because this film was scary or that I wondered how the man who directed movies like Precious, The Butler and The United States vs. Billy Holiday thought this movie was something anyone needed to see. Admittedly, I like bad movies. I can usually find something interesting or entertaining about them to justify their existence in the world, but I had to seriously wrack my brain to find something that made this film worth its existence and consistently came up short.

The film follows a single mother living in Indiana with her three children and her ailing mother. As the mother struggles with her personal life and dark past, darker forces invade her home and target her children. This is the perfect setup for a horror movie. Unfortunately, the execution is a failed mixture of bad writing, cliched moments and a tone that turns possibly exciting and terrifying moments into an emotional and visual slog for anyone watching.

Andra Day is cast in the lead role and as dynamic and engaging an actress she is, she cannot save a performance bound by bad dialogue and character arcs that are driven by circumstance rather than any kind of emotional awakening within the character. She is a walking, talking reaction without motivation and at no point do you care about her as a character. It’s almost as if the writers are punishing the character throughout the film and the viewer is given no idea as to why she deserves it.

If there was one surprising element of this “horror” movie is Glenn Close as the mother Alberta. Her character is the only one in the film that has any sense of presence which is a shame in a film with a predominantly black cast. She’s the only one that seems to have some semblance of a character arc even though we only get to hear about it most of the time. She elevates some cringeworthy dialogue and character moments and I was thankful for her character’s exit because I felt like she was saved from having to endure the rest of this mess of a movie.

The rest of the cast is there and that is the most I can say about them. The children, including Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin, have no personality and feel more like caricatures. There is one scene of potential conflict between McLaughlin’s character and Day’s, but it never goes anywhere. Mo’Nique’s character seems to be some foil for the main character, but between insulting everyone for no reason, she just kind of stands around contributing noting but antagonism until she gets an emotional moment that comes out of nowhere. There are multiple scenes that tease struggle for the characters, but none of them pan out. It’s the problem of having all of the characters as plot devices instead of people. You see these things happen to them, but without establishing them as people, you fail to care.

The other problem is that the movie is not scary. It fails at all of the fundamental, even cliché, story elements that make a horror movie. Everything that is meant to be scary comes across as darkly comical to the point where I was laughing out loud at both the “scares” and the character’s reactions to them. The movie degenerates into a message movie about faith and religion that never established the importance of those things to the main character until two thirds through the movie.

The Deliverance is an unintentionally funny attempt at a horror movie that Daniels directs with a heavy hand and zero heart. I don’t get the sense he cares about the genre or the story at all and that laziness is present in every frame.