What is The Deliverance about?
The Deliverance focuses on a Black family that grapples with both literal and metaphorical demons. Director Lee Daniels uses the horror genre to viscerally explore topics that populate his filmography: spiritual warfare, generational trauma, and the quest for redemption. Ebony’s battle to protect her family coincides with her own battle with internal darkness, with systemic oppression. And Ebony’s battle is a reflection of a much larger battle, of the mental distress that has plagued the Black community for decades. Her struggle to shape her identity and escape her past is her people’s struggle. And in order to overcome such cyclical trappings, Daniels uses The Deliverance to argue that the community must first find its faith and reckon with its darkest demons.
Cast
- Andra Day – Ebony
- Glenn Close – Alberta
- Anthony B. Jenkins – Andre
- Caleb McLaughlin – Nate
- Demi Singleton – Shante
- Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor – Reverend Bernice James
- Mo’Nique – Cynthia Henry
- Omar Epps – Melvin
- Miss Lawrence – Asia
- Colleen Camp – Doctor Hoffsteder
- Juanita Jennings – Mrs. Tucker
- Kimberly Russell – Mrs. Ross
- Tasha Smith – Pastor Powell
- David Coggeshall – Writer
- Elijah Bynum – Writer
- Lee Daniels – Director
The themes and meaning of The Deliverance
Spiritual warfare and finding salvation
Lee Daniels uses a phrase repeatedly in interviews about The Deliverance: it’s a “faith-based thriller.” As a Black director, Daniels feels he is bringing an atypical perspective to your typical “exorcism” movie, and hopes to redefine what the genre can achieve. Known for his raw and unfiltered storytelling, Daniels takes the traditional elements of this genre, demons, haunted houses, and spiritual battles, and infuses them with an exploration of faith and redemption. In this way, Daniels uses horror to speak to the deepest anxieties and spiritual struggles of its characters, of the Black community, of anyone suffering from a crisis of faith. Thus: the intersection between horror and faith.
Faith is not just the backdrop, but the essence of the story. Ebony’s fight for survival, for her family’s survival, is intertwined with her spiritual warfare. As she protects her family, she’s also on a journey to reclaim her faith and find salvation. This spiritual journey, thus, is central to the narrative, making its story as much about redemption as it is about fear. As Daniels explained in his interview with Essence, “It’s not looking at it as a horror movie, but rather a movie about trying to find your higher power and about me trying to find my higher power too.”
The opening quote explained
Ebony’s journey speaks to the movie’s opening quote: “I need forgiveness for my sins, but I also need deliverance from the power of sin. I need forgiveness for what I have done, but I also need deliverance from what I am.” In the film, the quote goes unattributed. But it actually comes from Watchman Nee, a famous Chinese church leader and Christian teacher. His passion and renown led to his imprisonment, where he stayed for 20 years until his death in 1972. Never once did he renounce his faith.
The quote addresses every aspect of Ebony’s spiritual warfare, from the need for redemption for her past actions (“I need forgiveness for my sins”) to the ongoing influence of sin in her life (“I also need deliverance from the power of sin”) to her internal conflict of identity, to her struggle to break free from the darkness within (“I also need deliverance from what I am”). For Ebony to rediscover her faith and find salvation, she must confront her torn psyche and learn to accept forgiveness for what she’s done. Only then can she accept God back into her life and rebuild.
Generational trauma in the Black community
And what Ebony has done in the past, and what has been done to her in the past, is what haunts her, is what leads to a crisis of faith. This speaks to the movie’s thematic exploration of generational trauma. Symbolically, the demonic possession of her children represents the unresolved pain and suffering passed down through generations, passed down through the family that was previously plagued by the devil in that very same house.
This sort of expansive trauma, as Daniels notes in this interview with Indiewire, particularly plagues the Black community. This is a thematic motif of Daniels’ movies, particularly Precious, but in The Deliverance it takes on a visceral, demonic form. This being his first horror film, Daniels uses the genre as a lens to examine how the scars of history, which stem from systemic racism and oppression, continue to haunt and shape the lives of Black people across generations. As Statista research shows, the generational impact has been severe, with 17.1 percent of Black families living below the poverty line—which is the case for Ebony and her children—compares to 8.6 of the white population, with Black Americans living below the poverty level twice as likely to report serious psychological distress. And with this film, Daniels proposes that faith, that redemption and salvation, are keys to the Black community overcoming such cyclical mental distress. “I realized [Ebony] had found her higher power,” says Daniels. “She had found Jesus, and that’s how she was able to take down the demon that was in the house.”
In The Deliverance, Daniels uses demonic possession as a metaphor that illustrates how this trauma can consume and control people’s lives. Ebony’s pain was likely the pain felt by her mother—someone who was both physically and mentally abusive to Ebony—when she was a child. (And Alberta is white, which might drive the point home even harder.) Plus, there’s that cryptic memory where Ebony was violated by one of Alberta’s boyfriends, where the generational trauma thickened. From Alberta to Ebony to Andre and Shante and Nate, you can see how the mental hardships of being Black in America, of living below the poverty line for your entire life, of believing that “everything is an effort”—something stated by a whopping 11 percent of Black participants in Statista’s study, compared to just 6.6 percent of white participants—would take a toll on you psychologically.
The ending of The Deliverance explained
With all that in mind, we can make thematic sense of the ending. Daniels made a pointed decision to cast Andra Day, a born-again Christian, in the role of Ebony. Given what we’ve discussed regarding Ebony’s spiritual warfare and her journey towards salvation, towards rediscovering her faith, Daniels wanted an actor who could authentically tap into the sort of spirituality required for that role. Especially given the film’s climactic scene, the moment where Ebony is infused with God’s powers and begins to speak in tongues, which is when our protagonist truly sheds her fear and accepts God into her life.
Ebony’s battle isn’t with some random demon—it’s her demon. It’s the demon that haunts the Black population in the United States. This demon is an illustration of how this trauma can consume and control lives, even the lives of our youngest, like Andre, if not addressed on a wider scale. Because while Ebony can find God and expel the demon from her home, the problems that plague her family and sent them into poverty in the first place still persist. Her battle is with another family’s inherited pain, with the destructive patterns that have been passed down to her.
This once again recalls the film’s opening quote, which speaks to the need for not just forgiveness of past sins, but also deliverance from the ongoing power of sin that continues to shape identity and behavior. The demon exists both within the individual and within society. Andre is experiencing the same hell that Trey experienced when he lived as a boy in that same home. And those two boys inherited that trauma from the system that stuck them in that neighborhood in the first place. Daniels suggests that Andre had no chance until his mother overcame her crisis of faith and accepted God back into life. Only then could she help her children, could she truly begin to address what’s holding them back, what’s preventing them from rising above the demonic muck they’re trapped beneath.
