Sometimes all a genre movie needs is an interesting setting to be worth a watch. An antichrist baby in Estonia? Sign me up.
Quick Plot: We open with a moody prayer circle that ends in throat slitting. The pile of dead Russians then gets an odd form of last rights in having their back tattoos skinned off and preserved.
Nearby, a hunky American priest appropriately named Father Fox is getting ready to leave the church to marry his pregnant girlfriend Laura. A cardinal convinces him to take on One Last Job: visiting nun Yulia, who claims to be carrying one savior and one antichrist in her own pregnant belly.
As things in St. Petersburg go south, Father Fox, Yulia, and handy Cardinal Russo escape to Estonia, where Laura's family money has kept a conveniently remote end-of-the-world cabin fully stocked with the basics for a few years of survival. Yulia's twins are doing surprisingly well. They can even hypnotize people.
Father Fox struggles with dreams that push him towards Yulia, something Russo's own texts seem to predict. Meanwhile, the townspeople are growing antsy, a plague is raging through the land, and a one-eyed Thomas Kretschmann is hot on the trail to kill some babies.
Deliver Us is co-directed by Lee Roy Kunz (who also plays Father Fox) and Cru Ennis, and co-written by Kunz and brother Kane Kunz.
To be clear, there is a lot of Kunz in this movie.
It's...fine. Deliver Us has a few strong assets: the Estonian backdrop adds automatic style, the cinematography has a clear point of view, and the cast is quite watchable. Where Deliver Us dies is its storytelling. The film opens with a bang (well, lots of cuts) and then seems to take an hour-long nap. It sets up several interesting character dynamics (especially around Jaune Kimmel's Laura) and then fizzles them out for what somehow feels like a rushed ending.
Still, there's something different about the script's approach to its infant dynamics. And the movie pays off on Chekhov's Law of Bear Traps, so I'm probably going to forgive its trespasses and promptly forget most of the details shortly thereafter.
High Points
It's hard to describe the look of Deliver Us without making it sound bad, but there's a dramatically blue-hued coloring that almost makes the film feel black and white in a way that's actually quite striking
Low Points
What the film has in style it seems to lose in actual substance when it comes to character. Is THAT how a priest would react to SPOILER ALERT his pregnant girlfriend being shot?!
Lessons Learned
Nuns are naturally good shots
Russian conductors have soft spots for babies
When you get old, you prepare for the apocalypse
Rent/Bury/Buy
Eh. Deliver Us has some visual appeal and is slightly better composed than the kind of film you haven't heard of streaming on Hulu, but it's hard to feel much passion for the end product. If the subject appeals to you, give it a go.
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