The Deliverance is the kind of movie that makes you appreciate mediocre horror, because suddenly “just fine” looks like a masterpiece. It’s inspired by the Ammons haunting case, which is wild, messy, and unnerving in all the right ways. This film, on the other hand, takes that raw, chaotic material and processes it into something so overcooked and preachy you half expect an altar call to appear in the “Skip Intro” button.
On paper, everything screams potential: Lee Daniels behind the camera, Andra Day, Mo’Nique, Glenn Close, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Caleb McLaughlin – that’s not a cast, that’s an awards short list. In practice, it’s like watching an all-star basketball team forced to play on a court made of soap. You keep seeing flashes of brilliance and then, whoops, somebody slides straight into a puddle of cliché.
Trauma, But Make It a Checklist
Ebony Jackson is a single mom trying to keep three kids alive, an elderly mother treated for cancer, and her sanity somewhere between the liquor store and the church. She has a criminal past, a history of alcoholism, and prior CPS involvement for physical abuse while drunk. Financially, she’s circling the drain and secretly paying for Alberta’s treatment out of pocket because the insurance lapsed.
That could have been a nuanced portrait of generational trauma and systemic failure. Instead, the script stacks issues on Ebony like it’s trying to win a trauma speedrun. The result isn’t empathy; it’s exhaustion. She’s written less as a person and more as a dramatic device labeled “Maximum Suffering,” so when demons show up it almost feels redundant. Hell’s like, “Sorry we’re late, you already had most of this covered.”
Dre and “Tre”: Demon Naming 101, Failed
The supernatural starts with Dre, the youngest kid, talking to an unseen friend called Tre. That’s right: you name your demon the same thing as a SoundCloud rapper.
Tre supposedly alternates between the basement and the closet, as all respectable demons must, and the film hits every “creepy kid” beat: catatonic spells, weird fixation on one spot in the house, alarming statements no one listens to until it’s way too late. There’s a dead cat in the basement, a nice big ominous hole in the concrete, and Dre repeatedly getting found down there like a child safety PSA that’s weirdly pro-hellmouth.
The problem isn’t the setup; it’s that the movie never finds a fresh way to play it. Every scare feels like horror karaoke: you’ve heard this song before, and better.
CPS, But Make It Demon-Friendly
Mo’Nique shows up as Cynthia, the Child Protective Services worker, and for a while she seems like the only person in the film who exists in a recognizable reality. She sees the bruises, the chaos, the generational mess, and tries to apply actual procedure to it. Naturally, the movie has no idea what to do with a character who’s rational and grounded, so it eventually has to get her onboard the demon train.
Cynthia is introduced as the reasonable skeptic, then instantly promoted to “Reluctant Believer” the moment she witnesses Dre crawl backwards up a wall. It’s a spectacular image buried in a script that seems incapable of subtlety. The film doesn’t build her doubt or terror; it just flicks a switch from “This is a troubled family” to “Oh right, Satan.”
By the time she’s helping Ebony kidnap Dre from the hospital to participate in an unsanctioned deliverance ritual, any sense that CPS exists as a real-world institution is gone. You’re left with the sense that the system fails families – which is true – but not in any way the movie actually wants to talk about.
The Pastor in the Car and the Exposition Express
Then there’s the woman in the parked car, who turns out to be a Pentecostal pastor with the plot conveniently pre-loaded. She once tried to prevent a previous tragedy in the house – a mother slaughtering her family under demonic influence – and now she’s on permanent creepy stakeout mode.
Her job is to tell Ebony (and us) that the house is a gateway to Hell. Not metaphorically. Literally. The script treats this like the world’s least surprising revelation, which would be fine if the movie had done any work to build ambiguity. Instead, by the time she appears, we’re so deep into wall-crawling and unstoppable basement magnetism that “gateway to Hell” feels like the narrative equivalent of “per my last email.”
The pastor then marches herself into the third act deliverance and gets promptly killed by demon-possessed Dre, which is about as subtle as the rest of the film’s theology: faith is powerful, but not powerful enough to keep you from getting shredded for drama points.
Exorcism, But It’s a Music Video
The climactic deliverance is an absolute tonal circus. Dre is possessed, Nate and Shante are remotely afflicted and suddenly bleeding from invisible wounds, and the house is acting like it wants its own SAG card. Ebony, armed with anointing oil and a lifetime of bad decisions, finally cries out to Jesus.
And then the movie goes full charismatic church highlight reel: speaking in tongues, Holy Spirit power-up, demon driven out, stigmata on the kids as a sort of cosmic receipt. It’s not that religious horror can’t go big – it absolutely can – but here it feels less like earned catharsis and more like the director yelling, “Crank EVERYTHING to eleven!”
There’s zero subtlety left. Just declarations, shouting, bleeding, and the sense that you’re watching an extended reenactment segment from a docudrama no one fact-checked.
Alberta and the Holy Fire Hazard
Glenn Close is here as Alberta, Ebony’s devout, cancer-stricken mother, and somehow the film still finds a way to make her feel underused. Alberta’s crucifix spontaneously catching fire should be chilling; instead, it plays like the props department got bored.
Her death – at Dre’s possessed hands – is supposed to be the emotional gut punch that shoves Ebony from skepticism into horror. But because the movie has already piled so many catastrophes onto Ebony’s shoulders, Alberta’s death lands less as a twist and more as, “Yeah, of course. Add it to the tab.”
Trauma, Then Jesus, Then Time Skip
In the aftermath, we get the tidy wrap-up: Ebony and Cynthia team up, Ebony embraces faith, CPS softens, six months later everyone’s reunited and moving back to Philadelphia with the kids’ father suddenly back in the picture. Years later, the house is demolished, but paranormal rumors linger because of course they do.
The speed with which the film slaps a bow on all this is almost impressive. After an hour-plus of relentless misery and demonic chaos, the bureaucracy of life just… cooperates. CPS is fine. The courts are fine. The abusive, alcoholic mother with a criminal record and a freshly exorcised kid gets her family back and a reconciled partner.
It’s less an ending and more like the movie realized it was nearly out of runtime and needed to sprint to the “inspirational” finish line.
Wasted Cast, Wasted Opportunity
The greatest sin of The Deliverance isn’t just that it’s messy. It’s that it wastes an incredible ensemble on a script that doesn’t trust them to be human. Andra Day gives everything, burning through scenes with raw nerve; Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor could preach an empty room into tears; Mo’Nique has the grounded intensity to make CPS scenes riveting; Glenn Close could read the terms and conditions and make you cry.
Instead, they’re all stuck in a movie that keeps choosing melodrama over nuance, sermon over story. The film is desperate to convince you of something – about faith, about demons, about redemption – but it never stops long enough to let its characters breathe, or its ideas land.
By the time the credits roll, you’re left with an odd sensation: you’ve watched talented people throw themselves at a wall for two hours, and the only thing that stuck was the demon. If you’re in the mood for possession horror and find The Deliverance in your Netflix suggestions, maybe take the hint from the title and deliver yourself right on past it.
