Andra Day plays a tormented and abusive single mother battling the devil within herself, until the real one shows up.

By Owen Gleiberman

As a filmmaker, Lee Daniels is often criticized for being flamboyantly loud and over-the-top. Sometimes that’s fair, but the truth is that Daniels is a gifted filmmaker when he’s firing on all cylinders. “The Deliverance” is the sixth feature he’s directed, and I’ve been a fan of three of them: “Precious” (2009), his extraordinary tale of an inner-city left-behind’s escape from her domestic hell; “The Paperboy” (2012), a bold and unnerving Southern gothic noir; and “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (2021), a musical-political biopic that, while flawed, did a fine job of channeling the complicated brutality of its subject matter.

So when I say that “The Deliverance,” a film about demonic possession that Daniels made for Netflix, is one of his kitschy, extreme schlock extravaganzas, I’m not saying it always is. But sometimes it is. And “The Deliverance” is not without its socially provocative Daniels undercurrents.