Deliver Us is a horror movie intentionally built around religion. It hasn’t been discussed much on the sites I frequent, but I suspect that it should be more. Yes, it gets aspects of religion wrong, but then most religious horror does. And it leaves a lot unexplained. Again, most religious horror also does. The cinematography is bleak and beautiful, evoking a winter chill. The story is built around a made up prophecy, but do I really need to say it a third time? Fr. Fox is a Catholic priest in Russia and a former exorcist. Like Fr. Karras, he doesn’t believe in demons, but his bishop really wants him to go to a convent to check out a possible genuine miracle. Fr. Fox is about to become Mr. so he can marry his pregnant girlfriend. Since she has to go to Estonia for a while, she encourages him to do this one last thing for the church.
Meanwhile, signs are occurring that the end times are arriving. In the convent a secret society called Vox Dei is harvesting prophecies from people’s backs. What sways Fox to go is that a renowned cuneiformist, Cardinal Russo, is there. Fox wrote his dissertation on “alphabetic cuneiform”—that’d be Ugaritic, folks. Not explaining where they got the human-skin scrolls, Russo needs Fox’s help in figuring out the language (it turns out to be cuneiform Zoroastrian). The miracle is a weeping Madonna statue, but there’s also an immaculately pregnant nun. She has twins in her, one the Messiah and the other the Antichrist. Fox doesn’t believe any of this but when he learns that the Cardinal is going to kill the babies to prevent the end of the world, Fox convinces him to give up the wicked plan and they escape with the nun.
This is enough to give you a flavor of the movie. I won’t give up the resolution but I will say it ends up revolving around the end of the world. In general this is a pretty intelligent movie. It borrows quite a lot from other films, including The Omen and The Shining, but it is fun to watch (if you don’t mind a bit of gore). The tension mounts as Vox Dei tries to find the escaped priest, Cardinal, and nun and there are some legitimately scary scenes. It was written and directed by Lee Roy Kunz, who also plays Fox. I do think this deserves more in-depth consideration and had it been out in time, and had I known of it, I would’ve included it in Holy Horror.
