‘The Deliverance’ Review: The Power of Camp Compels Him

The director Lee Daniels frees his actors to exorcise their demons with audacious performances that rank among the most memorable of their careers. (If you’ve yet to see the mischief Nicole Kidman gets up to in “The Paperboy,” you’re in for a hoot.) With “The Deliverance,” a riotously wacky horror flick, Daniels adds actual demons, too, sending his latest troubled heroine, Andra Day, straight over the edge. Day, a Grammy-winning musician, earned a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for her performance in Daniels’s “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.” Not only can she sing and act — here, she’s an outrageous scream queen.

Day plays Ebony, a single mother plagued by bills, alcohol addiction and her own violent temper. Her three glum children — Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins), Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) and Shante (Demi Singleton) — have endured years of abuse even before something wicked in their new home urges the tykes to hurt themselves and each other. Adding to the pressure, Ebony’s born-again, floozy mother, Alberta (Glenn Close), has moved in to recover from cancer (and criticize her daughter’s cooking), while a social worker named Cynthia (Mo’Nique) drops by to monitor the kids’ bruises, and, when pushed out the door, hurls as many nasty quips as she gets. When the spooky business starts, Ebony barely notices. She simply slams the basement door and keeps on trucking.

The script by David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum is a riff on the 2011 case of Latoya Ammons, whose claims that evil spirits had overtaken her family were corroborated by a Department of Child Services case manager, a medic, a police captain and a priest. But “The Deliverance” is driven by Ebony’s struggle to convince anyone to believe her — the pitiless authorities refuse to look past her own flaws. To the audience, however, she deepens into a riveting character study, particularly in one close-up where Ebony agonizes over whether maintaining her truth is worth the terrible personal consequences.