If Glenn Close wanted to ensure a break from the interminable glad-handing of awards season, she has locked that down with The Deliverance. This is a vehicle that no one in their right mind would nominate for a single thing – unless there were trophies for Trashiest Wigs, or Pointiest Shark Teeth On A Glenn Close Demon Face.
What we’re looking at here is a horror-thriller about demonic possession from the Oscar-nominated director of Precious, Lee Daniels, who based the idea on a much-ballyhooed “true story”. But it certainly doesn’t scan as the true story of anything that might have happened, in 2011-2, to Latoya Ammons, a mother of three from Indiana, who was closely monitored by the Department of Child Services when all three of her children, aged 7, 9 and 12, started exhibiting violent behaviour and mysterious bruises.
Renamed Ebony, this version of Ammons is played by Andra Day (Daniels’ current leading lady of choice who made her debut in The United States vs. Billie Holiday), and we sort of get her point of view, except we also don’t, while the film shows her children spiralling in a bleak, thumpingly tedious, and poorly-acted-except-by-the-kids first hour. Finally, the explanation arrives. Roughly, “it was Satan, all along”.
Even Ebony’s deeply suspicious social worker (Mo’Nique) is eventually witness to the youngest child breaking out of restraints and scuttling up a wall. (We doubt this actually “happened”.) She gets off lightly compared with the character played by King Richard’s Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor: a faith healer the script refuses to call an exorcist, whom Daniels has described in interviews, rather less emphatically, as a “deliverance person”.
In real life, this guardian was male, but never mind, and Latoya’s mother was actually Black. But let’s cast… Close? She gives a gruesomely sassy, off-puttingly horny performance even before total demonic takeover. From then on, all bets are off: unprintable insults about which parts of people’s anatomies are stinky; levitations; lightning; the works.
The film succumbs to being undiluted tripe yet still has the gall to bolster itself with a dedication to Latoya, aiming to be taken seriously by simply inventing the gospel truth. The trouble is, no haunting that’s as campy and unfrightening as the Halloween aisle at Lidl gets to bully us into buying it.
On Netflix from now
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