'The Deliverance': The trill horror of where you rent
w/: In 'The Tenant' (1976) Polanski directs himself as a renter with an unraveling mind
One of my best Portland friends works in the art departments of a many great TV series and independent films. On Portlandia, where he started, my guy distinguished himself as a set dresser. He’d be arranging all of the objects that appeared in front of the camera during a scene.
The Deliverance has an almost hateful attitude towards logic, as one might expect of a film so hooked on Jesus.
He made places for the actors to play. A set dresser, I learned in Portland, develops a viewer’s sense of place while they’re thinking the set just happened to look that way when the director yelled “Action.” There’s storytelling in the book case and in the pictures on the fridge.
Take these spaces from an episode named Friend Convention. They depict variations on a few White Portland milieu.
The show was nominated for eight Art Direction Emmys but repeatedly lost to Saturday Night Live, whose budget dwarfed Portlandia.
I digress though.
Parasite had high-level set dressing. The Big Lebowski also comes to mind, probably because no rug in cinema history has better brought a room together. Your average horror film, however, does not have awesome set dressing.
The set dressing in Lee Daniels’ new Netflix b-movie The Deliverance is super specific and very good. The Deliverance itself has an almost hateful attitude towards logic, as one might expect of a film so hooked on Jesus. It wraps up still lacking a clue to of how to be a supernatural thriller.
But this movie’s sense of urban low-rent housing in the 2011 Black American sense is the trillest. You can smell the mentholated cigarettes. Daniels has the horror of Black ghetto mama misery in league with the devil, and the only remedy is an off-brand exorcism. A “deliverance.” Yes, the man who brought us Precious has attempted to realize the horror film that’s been threatening to bust out of his darkly-stylized social realism. Finally.
Andra Day plays Ebony, a bitter, abusive single mother with a drinking problem, and the alcohol’s like Ebony’s third biggest problem. The main drag? That a dead kid’s spirit is causing their new, shitty Pittsburgh rental to possess Day’s children. This spirit named Tre is also impolite enough to be all mysterious in revealing its devilish ways.
Also, Day’s bald and slutty White mama—played by the unforgettably game Glenn Close—is dying of cancer and acting like a kind of cancer toward her. Day carries the movie and moves gracefully between realistic grit and confusion over the unearthly.
A year prior to being arrested in LA for statutory rape, Polanski himself stars as renter in an oddly American-dominated Paris apartment building.
Now and again The Deliverance will pop out and have a scene in a church or at school, but this flick lives in Ebony’s shitty rental. The household’s fantastically, illogically accomplished children get sick and weird and violent, all while the evils of urban American poverty threaten to engulf Ebony’s clan.
There’s a metaphor in this housing, but even good ol’ Flannery O’Conner might say that she’s seen it before. (My fave new line is that Christianity is a book club that got out of hand.) The Deliverance is much more at home being off-kilter and surprising when ensconced in the grounded first half of the film. There’s not a lot new that’s useful in its last act.
Despite what’s going on in my own shelter life, it was unintentional that I happened upon another tortured renter film last night. At least, the choice wasn’t wholly conscious.
Might have been Jesus pickin’ flicks for me, but I doubt it.
The Tenant is the third film in Roman Polanski’s so-called apartment trilogy. (With Rosemary’s Baby and Revulsion) The film reached theaters in 1976, yet feels a decade older. A year prior to being arrested in LA for statutory rape, Polanski himself stars as renter in an oddly American-dominated Paris apartment building.
This film is fuckin’ zesty with subtext.
Polanski’ metaphor remains pretty clear nearly 50 years away from the film’s release. The apartment building is the America that took his wife and unborn child, an untrustworthy place that was driving him mad. And if you aren’t looking to go that deep, the abode simply plays host to a compelling piece of cinema.
More unsettling than horrifying—don’t go in expecting another Rosemary’s Baby—The Tenant is incredibly assured and knows what it wants to be.
The set dressing is significant and convincing, too.
Anniversary Week is upon us!
Did I think I’d get to this point when I started this Substack last year? Fuck yeah. I’m a writer, bound to do my thing to the best of my ability—in one story form or another—whether people decide to pay me or not.
It’s always better to get money, but I love that you have read this far.
Really loving your recent posts. This one gives me a lot to look up and think about.