“A haunting, nightmarish vision.” – Time Out

“This is the weekend they didn’t play golf,” reads the ominously jocular tagline for director John Boorman’s legendarily unsettling 1972 film, which stands as one of the most inspired combinations of filmmaker and source material in cinematic history. Based on James Dickey’s novel, Deliverance follows a group of Atlanta businessmen who take a canoe trip through the remote backwoods of North Georgia. What happens next has lost little of its power to shock, despite years of imitations and parodies. Boorman is in full command of his material here, attaching a haunting, mythic quality to the starkness of Dickey’s story. Combined with Vilmos Zsigmond’s moody camerawork and the sparse banjo-driven score, the director gives his locations a heightened, haunting quality. As gripping as the work behind the camera is though, the film wouldn’t have nearly the kick it does without the central performances by Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox, and especially Ned Beatty, who skews the already slippery moral compass further by not playing his character as particularly sympathetic, even in the wake of the movie’s most infamous scene. A surprise box office smash, Deliverance was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, losing out to The Godfather. The film still hits a primal nerve early on and then masterfully keeps on digging, transforming its story of horror into something primal, grasping, and timeless.

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