The Deliverance

There is a specific kind of "Netflix Friday" delirium that happens when a high-profile, Oscar-nominated director decides to crash-land into a genre they have no business being in. We saw it with Ben Wheatley’s Rebecca, and in 2024, we got the Lee Daniels version of a jump-scare festival. Lee Daniels, the man who gave us the harrowing realism of Precious and the campy sweatiness of The Paperboy, turned his lens toward the supernatural with The Deliverance. It is a film that feels like it’s constantly fighting a war with itself: one half wants to be a gritty, social-realist drama about a Black family struggling with systemic failure, and the other half wants to be The Exorcist but with more swearing.

I watched this on a Tuesday night while my neighbor was outside power-washing their driveway for three hours straight, and the rhythmic, industrial drone of the water actually provided a more consistent sense of dread than some of the film’s actual scares.

A Prestige Director in a Haunted Basement

The story follows Ebony Jackson (Andra Day), a struggling mother dealing with an alcohol habit and a debt-ridden life, who moves her three kids and her mother into a house that—shocker—is less "fixer-upper" and more "portal to hell." Because this is a Lee Daniels joint, the family dynamics are dialed up to eleven. We aren’t just dealing with ghosts; we’re dealing with Child Protective Services, played with a weary, clinical chill by Mo'Nique (reunited with Daniels years after her Oscar win).

What makes this interesting in the context of 2024 cinema is how it attempts to subvert the "haunted house" trope by grounding it in the very real horror of being a marginalized family under the microscope of the state. When the kids start acting up—climbing walls or speaking in tongues—the system doesn't see a demon; it sees a mother who has finally snapped. For the first hour, I was genuinely impressed by how much the film leaned into this tension. It felt like a "social horror" piece that actually had something to say about how we perceive trauma in Black households.

The Alberta of It All

Then, there’s Glenn Close. I need to talk about Alberta, Ebony’s mother. Glenn Close playing a white-trash-glam cancer survivor in a horror movie feels like a fever dream directed by a chaotic AI. She’s wearing heavy makeup, sporting a collection of wigs that deserve their own IMDB credits, and delivering lines with a ferocity that suggests she thought she was in a different movie entirely.

It is a performance that has already become a bit of a cult artifact on social media. Is it "good"? That’s a complicated question. Is it watchable? I couldn’t take my eyes off her. In an era where many streaming movies feel like they’ve been sanded down by focus groups to be as inoffensive as possible, Glenn Close’s work here is a jagged, weirdly fascinating outlier. She brings a "Grand Guignol" energy that the movie eventually succumbs to in its final act.

The kids, played by Anthony B. Jenkins, Caleb McLaughlin (of Stranger Things), and Demi Singleton, do a lot of the heavy lifting. Anthony B. Jenkins, in particular, has to do that "creepy kid" routine that we’ve seen a thousand times since 1973, but he injects it with a vulnerability that made me actually care about his soul, rather than just waiting for the next CGI effect.

The "Demon House" and Streaming Oddities

If you’re wondering why the plot feels vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s loosely based on the "Latoya Ammons" case, also known as the 211 souls house. It was a massive news story in Indiana back in 2014, even drawing in testimony from police officers and social workers. Zak Bagans, the Ghost Adventures guy, actually bought the real house and filmed a documentary there before tearing it down.

Turns out, the production of The Deliverance had its own set of "creepy" happenings—the kind of stuff marketing teams love to leak. Lee Daniels reportedly had a priest on set to bless the production, which is a classic horror movie marketing trope that still works on me every single time.

The film struggles most when it stops being a family drama and starts being a standard exorcism flick. Once Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor shows up as Rev Bernice James, the movie loses its grounded footing and descends into a chaotic blur of CGI and religious platitudes. In the current landscape of "Prestige Horror" (think A24’s output), The Deliverance feels like a throwback to the more sensationalist, slightly messy studio horrors of the early 2000s, but with a 2024 budget and a much more talented cast than the script probably deserves.

Ultimately, The Deliverance is a fascinating mess. It’s too well-acted to be a "bad" movie, but it’s too tonally confused to be a "great" one. It exists in that strange middle ground of the streaming era: a film that will be watched by millions on a Saturday night, debated on Twitter for forty-eight hours because of Glenn Close’s eyebrows, and then mostly forgotten by the time the next true-crime docuseries drops. I didn't hate my time with the Jackson family, but I do think Lee Daniels might want to stick to the horrors of the real world—he’s much better at those than the ones hiding in the basement.