The Deliverance (2024) Dor: Lee Daniels
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Netflix originals have a very spotty reputation - for every award-winning success, there's three straight to streaming amateurish failures. As someone who enjoys horror films, even if they're only mildly good, I figured I'd see if this Lee Daniels directed horror was any good.
It was not. Not in the slightest. The film tried to be part family drama and part horror, but ended up doing neither of them particularly well. In the first hour of the film, the only "horror" was the way the mother treated her children, as well as herself. It was so horrible to watch, especially considering that the audience is supposed to root for this character.
The film had a lot of shoddy filmmaking, if I'm being honest. The camerawork was all over the place, the lighting was dodgy and the continuity was poor - there were literally times where for one person it was night and another it was day. The visual effects also looked extremely tacky - it was impossible to take seriously.
There were genuinely no likable or interesting characters, which only made the weak-as-water plot more unbearable to watch. Honestly, I laughed at the way the story unfolded. It was so unashamedly on the nose, and so high on its own message.
What could have been a potentially poignant film about family, single parents and a mother's resilience, very quickly exposed itself as a cheap ad-campaign to give up your vices and find faith. It had the subtlety of an elephant with sparklers on its ears in a room full of china.
Andra Day acted her socks off to try and pull some kind of positivity away from the film, but there's only so much one person can do. I didn't mind her acting - except for some scenes where even she seemed to recognise how incredibly bad the whole thing was, her character was so nasty that I just could not invest in her emotionally.
Glenn Close gave a truly bizarre performance, with a character who behaved in so many contradictory ways it was hard to keep up. Evidently, she was trying to produce some nuance, but it came across like she had never acted before on her life.
The actors playing the children were by far the most bearable, but each of them fell apart during the more paranormal parts of their roles. Of the three, Demi Singleton was the most consistent, though also the most underutilised. Meanwhile, both Anthony B. Jenkins and Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin were all over the place by the end.
There were some mixed performances from the rest of the supporting cast, with the only ones really worthy of note being the trio of Mo'Nique, Omar Epps and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, though Ellis-Taylor I mainly mention because of how ridiculous her acting was at the end of the film.
Overall, I almost couldn't believe how bad the film turned out to be - I just had to laugh, and not because I was having fun with it. This was a very strong contender for worst film of the year. There were so many problems with this film, and it failed to show either a comprehensive family redemption story or a remotely scary supernatural horror. Skip this one, for your own sake.
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