Imagine The Exorcist but set in a Manhattan co-op, and instead of pea soup and crucifixes, the horror is expressed through Shirley MacLaine’s high-fashion contempt and an unnecessary decapitation count. Welcome to The Possession of Joel Delaney, a 1972 supernatural horror film that tries to tackle race, class, incest, and demonic possession—all while managing to be tone-deaf, exploitative, and absurdly dull.
This is a movie that thinks it’s making high art, when in reality, it’s just throwing voodoo paint at the wall and hoping it spells “prestige.”
🧠 Plot: Bad Spirits, Worse Decisions
Set in the New York of fur coats and cultural myopia, the story follows Norah Benson (Shirley MacLaine), an upscale divorcee whose idea of diversity is letting her Puerto Rican maid pick the wine. Her younger brother Joel (Perry King), a vaguely “bohemian” recent returnee from Tangier, begins exhibiting some very erratic behavior, like speaking in tongues, hoarding switchblades, and generally acting like he’s auditioning for an off-Broadway remake of Psycho.
Of course, Joel’s not just eccentric—he’s possessed by the spirit of Tonio Pérez, a Puerto Rican serial killer from Spanish Harlem. Cue the culturally insensitive séance, a trip uptown that might as well be Mordor for these Upper East Siders, and a climax so luridly tasteless it might make Lucio Fulci wince.
What unfolds is a queasy blend of supernatural hokum, racial stereotyping, and thinly veiled incestuous undertones—all dressed up in tweed, turtlenecks, and psychobabble.
🎭 Shirley MacLaine, Miscast and Outclassed
Shirley MacLaine gives the kind of performance that screams, “I was told this would be an Oscar contender.” Her Norah is supposed to be a sympathetic matriarch trying to save her brother’s soul, but she plays it like someone personally offended that her housekeeper might know Spanish. MacLaine’s presence, while commanding, only underscores how laughably out-of-place this whole story feels in its attempt to merge The Exorcist with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but without the nuance, horror, or dignity of either.
As Joel, Perry King does his best soap-opera sociopath impression. He’s fine when shirtless and brooding, but watching him transition into an alleged vessel of evil is like watching a lacrosse player try to do kabuki theater. The possession feels less demonic and more like a particularly nasty case of food poisoning.
📉 Themes: The Devil’s in the Incompetence
The Possession of Joel Delaney wants to say something profound about class, race, and the colonial residue of New York’s elite. But its execution lands somewhere between unintentionally offensive and straight-up exploitative.
You want a critique of white liberal guilt and systemic racism? Go read James Baldwin. Here, we’re served up voodoo as a spooky parlor trick, Santería as an “ethnic curiosity,” and Harlem as the urban jungle where evil spirits—and presumably, also jazz—live.
Worse still is the film’s take on family dynamics. There’s an incest subtext here that’s not so much “sub” as it is “front and center in neon lights.” Norah and Joel’s relationship is so uncomfortably close that when she isn’t sobbing over his breakdown, she’s basically giving him the eyes your aunt gave that bartender in Cabo. The final scene, where she kisses her dying brother and then brandishes a knife like she’s about to start The Possession of Norah Benson, feels less like a tragic conclusion and more like an early pitch for American Horror Story: Upper West Side.
🧛 Horror? Barely. Offensive? Definitely.
Despite its title, the film contains precious little actual horror. Most of the scares are either clunky hallucinations or characters yelling in bad Spanish. The sole genuinely creepy moment—the discovery of a decapitated head hanging from a houseplant—is squandered by how cartoonishly it’s presented. By the time Joel starts feeding dog food to children and demanding stripteases, the movie has gone full grindhouse—and not in a fun way. It’s like Rosemary’s Baby met Faces of Death on a Greyhound and had a very confused child.
Waris Hussein’s direction is competent in the sense that a camera was pointed at actors and they said lines, but the pacing is glacial. The entire film moves with the urgency of someone waiting for room service. There are long, brooding silences, awkward insert shots, and flashbacks that add nothing but runtime. By the time we get to the botched exorcism scene in Spanish Harlem, the audience is begging for the spirit of Tonio to just wrap it up already.
📽️ Production Values vs. Values, Period.
Shot in NYC and London, the movie at least has a grimy 1970s aesthetic that works—sort of. The Upper East Side glistens in a way that reminds you just how removed these people are from the suffering of others. Meanwhile, Spanish Harlem is shot like a jungle in a Tarzan movie. Subtlety, this is not.
The $1.5 million budget seems to have been spent largely on overcoats, blood packs, and a set of wigs that might actually be cursed. The soundtrack is forgettable, and the cinematography oscillates between “cheap soap opera” and “accidental art house.”
But let’s give credit where it’s due: the film dares to have an ending that isn’t just bleak—it’s deranged. When Norah picks up that knife at the end, smiling vacantly, we’re not afraid. We’re exhausted. What started as a misguided exploration of social inequality ends as a mess of half-baked symbolism, bad accents, and the worst family reunion ever.
Final Verdict: Possessed, But Not by Quality
The Possession of Joel Delaney thinks it’s making grand statements about colonial guilt, spiritual displacement, and the fragility of the modern family. What it’s actually doing is fumbling its way through a pseudo-intellectual haunted house, leaving a trail of bad dialogue, racial caricatures, and Freudian weirdness behind.
It’s not smart enough to be art, not scary enough to be horror, and not trashy enough to be fun. Instead, it’s a head-scratching cultural artifact from the 1970s—an accidental time capsule of a generation’s spiritual confusion and moral blind spots.
★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 5 stars)
See it only if you want to understand how a movie about demonic possession can itself be possessed—by mediocrity.
