'The Deliverance' review: Despite Andra Day's performance, just another haunted house movie

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The Ammons haunting case, an alleged demonic possession that happened to a family inside a Gary, Indiana, home beginning in 2011, loosely inspires a Hollywood treatment in "The Deliverance." 

Lee Daniels ("Precious") directs the picture, transplanting the setting to Pittsburgh and changing the family to the fictional Jacksons. Mom Ebony (Andra Day) lives with children Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins), Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) and Shante (Demi Singleton) inside the home, along with grandma Alberta (Glenn Close).

There are serious tensions and broken hearts inside this family, which make them especially vulnerable to the supernatural force that has taken up residence.

Co-stars include Mo'Nique as a social worker and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as the religious figure with a special knowledge of possession that every movie like this needs.

MY SAY Daniels has a long established reputation as one of the more idiosyncratic American filmmakers, specializing in hothouse dramas and imbuing even straightforward movies like his historical pageant "The Butler" with a distinct strangeness.

His involvement in "The Deliverance" hints at something more than the same old trip to the haunted house well, but he fails to find a unique way into this story.

Instead, his movie offers precisely the sights and sounds of so many others before it: foreboding signs throughout the house; a possessed child crawling up a wall; a verbal and physical battle between the spiritual leader and the demon, and so much more.

There's hardly a single feature to set this movie apart.

That's not to mention its indulgence in the subgenre's classic fallacy. Close's character acknowledges that "there's something evil in my home and it's feeding on my family." But they don't leave. Get out of the house, for heaven's sake. It's a lesson so obvious, you wonder how characters ever since the movie version of the Lutz family, our "Amityville Horror" neighbors here on Long Island, have ignored it.

Of course, if anyone actually thought through these scenarios, we wouldn't have haunted house pictures to begin with. So you suspend your disbelief, and let the characters stick around.

While we're cycling through the expected scares, the picture makes some time to internalize the horror and tie it into Ebony's own personal failings.

"The Deliverance" has its best moments when it allows the actors to act and forgets about the clichés. Day, who earned an Oscar nomination for starring in Daniels' 2021 "The United States vs. Billie Holiday," conveys a tangible sense of self-disgust and unease, presenting a compelling picture of a mother who has been cast adrift from her children.

The best movies in this space, such as the terrific Australian picture "The Babadook," recognize that the possessors should be secondary in importance to the possessed, and that we go to horror pictures in part to understand something fundamental about ourselves.

"The Deliverance" has been made by people who surely understand this. And yet there's relatively little interest in the human drama, because there are so many marks to hit on the way toward the same old climactic battle between good and evil.

BOTTOM LINE It's yet another haunted house movie that barely distinguishes itself from the pack.