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‘The Deliverance’ Review: Lee Daniels Directs a Demonic-Possession Movie in Which the Real Demons Are Personal (and Flamboyant)
Andra Day plays a tormented and abusive single mother fighting the devil in herself. Then the real one shows up.
“ The Deliverance ” is the sixth feature he has directed, and I’ve been a fan of three of them: “Precious” (2009), his extraordinary tale of a stunted inner-city teenager’s escape from her domestic hell; “The Paperboy” (2012), a bold and unnerving Southern gothic noir; and “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (2021), a musical-political biopic that, while flawed, did a superb job of channeling its subject’s complicated ferocity. Andra Day, so potent as Billie Holiday, plays Ebony, a single mother struggling to raise three kids — teenage Shante (Demi Singleton) and Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) and young Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins) — without much money, and with nerves that frayed long ago. Usually, the heroine of a horror film is a besieged innocent, but before “The Deliverance” gets to the possession part it focuses on the demons in Ebony: her willingness to hit her kids, and her tendency to lash out, in a way that’s nasty and full of rage, at everyone around her, even the devil.
Or read this on Variety
