T10 years ago, Lee Daniels announced he was taking on a film project about the true case of Latoya Ammons, a single mother who claimed her house was haunted, her children were possessed by evil spirits, and she needed “redemption” – in other words, an exorcism. Now the resulting, very silly and mediocre film has finally been released, with Ammons having long since moved out of the house in question in real life; it itself being razed to the ground, and some of the more excited and credulous media reports that helped secure the film deal having subsequently cooled, leaving behind perhaps a greater emphasis on those heartless observers who were hardened enough to wonder whether Ammons’s paranormal claims weren’t just a drama queen’s ploy to beat the rent and swindle the welfare office.
Daniels could have made a brilliant, emotive film about the Ammons case that explored just that possibility; the possibility that the case wasn’t real but was real in another sense, a film that cast “possession” as a metaphor for the racism, sexism, poverty and class prejudice that lead to dysfunction and delusions in a family like this one. And for a while, it looks like Daniels succeeds in doing just that, with robust and expressive performances from Andra Day as the mother, Mo’Nique (so powerful in Daniels’ film Precious) as her social worker and Glenn Close as Alberta, the dour grandmother who has been born again and is now a Christian, Close bringing both to this role as a black comedian, just as she did in her role as JD Vance’s dour Mamaw in Hillbilly Elegy.
There are also no scares for a long time, and for a while, Everyone’s First to Die looks like a social drama with a strange chill of unease, as the children seem unable or unwilling to explain to the social worker how they got their bruises. And when something terrible happens at the children’s school and psychological explanations are still viable, the film actually packs a De Palma-style punch.
But then, with terrible inevitability, the film devolves into a big, standard, derivative sub-Exorcist piece of ridiculous nonsense, in which, like so many real-life exorcism films (for example, The Conjuring 2, about the case of the Enfield poltergeist), it appears that none of those involved have seen The Exorcist. No one actually recognizes the close similarity between this world-famous fantasy and what they claim to be the truth. This film is covered in a thick ectoplasm of disappointment.
