Everyone’s a sinner in Antonio Campos’ moody coal country crime drama The Devil All The Time
Film Reviews The Devil All the Time
Note: The writer of this review watched The Devil All The Time from home on a digital screener. Before making the decision to see it—or any other film—in a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Here’s an interview on the matter with scientific experts.
Two crucifixions loom over director Antonio Campos’ The Devil All The Time. The first is the one that killed Jesus Christ. The other is the one that World War II veteran Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård) witnesses on the Solomon Islands, when he finds a fellow soldier who’s been flayed and strung up while still alive. When he returns from the war to his home in southeastern Ohio, Willard isn’t particularly religious. But the more he roots himself in his community, and the more he thinks about the terrible things he’s seen, the more fervently Christian he becomes. Like a lot of the characters in this story, when Willard needs something beyond his capacity to deliver, he prays hard. Sometimes he even makes blood sacrifices, just as the Holy Bible demands.
Still, God does nothing. It seems only human beings—vile, needy, greedy human beings—can change what happens to each other.
Campos and his brother Paulo wrote the screenplay for The Devil All The Time, based on a 2011 Donald Ray Pollock novel. The Campos brothers compress some elements of Pollock’s book, to make it less episodic and more like one continuous story. But they retain the overall meaning and tone, making something that feels equally inspired by seamy Jim Thompson novels and florid Southern gothic literature. The film is mostly set in the 1950s and ’60s, in an unincorporated area of coal country near the borders of Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky known as Knockemstiff. The underpaid, hard-working folks who live in the tiny, interconnected hillside communities in The Devil All The Time are almost in an entirely different America, with their own sets of laws and beliefs.
The story’s main focus is on Willard’s teenage son Arvin (Tom Holland), who endures a series of family tragedies that leave him as hardened as his dad. With no real long-term goals, Arvin mostly spends his days looking out for his own people—and especially his orphaned friend Lenora (Eliza Scanlen), who gets mercilessly bullied by the older boys at their school. Lenora is the daughter of the fiery preacher Roy Laferty (Harry Melling), who died under mysterious circumstances; she’s secretly being seduced by the new minister, Reverend Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson), who uses scripture to belittle and manipulate his congregation. Meanwhile, the whole area is being very loosely policed by the corrupt Sheriff Lee Bodecker (Sebastian Stan), whose own sister Sandy (Riley Keough) is one half of a couple who get their kicks by seducing lonely travelers and then murdering them. (Jason Clarke plays the other half.)
In short: The Devil All The Time is a portrait of a place populated by creeps and abusers, where the police and the church offer little refuge. Campos and his ace cast tell this bleak tale in a series of dramatic set pieces, meant to plunge viewers deep into a region dominated by darkness and fear. The movie runs a little over two hours, and roughly every 10 minutes there’s another riveting, unnerving scene: like when Roy proves his faith in church by pouring a box of live spiders over his head, or when Preston delivers an insulting sermon around Willard’s grandmother’s potluck plate of fried chicken livers. Campos—best-known for the jittery character dramas Afterschool and Christine, and for helping establish the moody atmosphere of the thoughtful TV crime series The Sinner—has a knack for creating moments on screen that are both uncomfortable to watch and difficult to turn away from.
His approach mostly works here, with a few exceptions. The pace slackens too much in the film’s final third, as the plot stops racing ahead through the characters’ lives and instead carefully positions them for a series of final confrontations. And while the performances are all strong, some of the attempts at Southern accents—Pattinson’s in particular—come across as exaggerated to the point of becoming cartoonish. There’s also a fogginess sometimes about Campos’ intentions. This is a grim picture about unhappy people; and it’s reasonable to wonder what the ultimate purpose is.
An answer of sorts comes late in the movie, when Arvin encounters a hippie on his way to Cincinnati. So much of this story takes place in what feels like an enclave inside Ohio, frozen in time and trapped in cycles of violence that the residents have just sort of… normalized, like a mass delusion. But what’s haunting about The Devil All The Time—and, ultimately even a little hopeful—is this idea that there’s a world beyond this world, where perhaps not everyone is so cruel or intense. It may not be the biblical Heaven; but that’s okay. Sometimes Cincinnati will suffice.
33 Comments
I’m sure their acting is great – but I feel like Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson are just too pretty to be believable backwater coal-country bumpkins.
yah one scene Pattinson is trying to make it seem like he’s got a big slobby gut when he’s getting it on, but that jawline doesn’t lie! but he really is excellent in it!
Holy crap, what a cast. Not thrilled about the prospect of overwrought southern accents, but this sounds interesting enough to brave anyway.
this is kinda a hilariously British-casted movie, the accents are going to be buckwild.
My understanding is that British actors prefer doing southern accents to other American ones because those diverged less from the common dialectical ancestor.
Watch the trailer. Tom Holland’s and Robert Pattinson’s accents are terrible. It’s like they watched an episode of Hee Haw and said to themselves, “that’s bloody brillant.”
in fairness this is set in the most rural, backwoods holler of deep Kentucky/gothic south that the accents ARE almost cartoonishly bad. But if you’ve ever been to them thar parts back then, they do speak somewhat…thick.
It sets place around where I was born. I’m actually starting to believe this is how I sound like and I just can’t tell anymore. People there sound normal to me, but maybe I’m just used to it.
Now I’m trying to imagine Yoda talking with a southern accent, and nothing makes sense.
Danged, well I’ll be.
The problem with bad Southern accents is not so much that they’re too thick but that they betray that the actor thinks the character is either stupid (bad redneck accent) or self-righteous and hypocritical (bad rich Southern accent).
I grew up around this area, and they are WILD. Pattinson’s in particular is all over the place. Most of ‘em are more generic Southern than specifically Appalachian.
Honestly, the promise of Robert Pattinson committing entirely to a terrible Southern accent is the first thing I’ve heard that makes me want to watch this movie. They should use that as a marketing blurb.
You know who wasn’t “devil all the time?” Future hall of fame goaltender Martin Brodeur. He never should have signed with St. Louis.
Or married his sister in law.
“This is a grim picture about unhappy people; and it’s reasonable to wonder what the ultimate purpose is.”That’s exactly how I felt about the book; it’s compelling, but it becomes so hopelessly cruel and nihilistic by the end that I didn’t really understand what the book was trying to accomplish.
I just finished the movie, I’m not sure what the message of all the violence was exactly except a lot of very violent people hiding behind religion? Otherwise it was pretty good, I actually think it could have been longer which I rarely say because with so many characters we didn’t get to see motivations much, and each character was so well acted you wouldn’t mind spending more time with them.
I liked it a lot, generally speaking we just don’t get many well directed movies like these. It had a bit of ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ to it, which is a good thing.
yeah, i thought maybe something in the end would tie it all up, but nothing did. for a minute, i thought the hippie would be charles manson or someone well-known but…nope. it just ends. the review nailed it when it mentioned jim thompson, i’m a big fan of his & with a few tweaks, this could easily be one of his stories.
I made it about halfway through the movie before stopping. I think the acting is generally fine, but tone is relentless and without other people living life not untouched by hardship but just averagely, it felt like a slog. Did the book breath a little? Compressed into a couple of hours, I just couldn’t muster the stomach or the interest.
Im so excited by this, and have been waiting since 2012 for it. I LOVE Donald Ray Pollock, he’s possibly my favorite living author. If you don’t have the pleasure yet, go read this, Knockemstiff and then the best of the bunch, THE HEAVENLY TABLE, which is my dream project. (I want so badly to adapt it into a one season/13 episode miniseries, I wrote the pilot a few years back and have a bible for the entire series and storylines sorted out…if you know the book its really a challenge to do so in a way that makes sense.) He is a hard, tough writer to read sometimes- he writes about ugly, brutal, mean people and mean places- but some of the most enjoyably ugly mean writing you’re ever gonna read.This could be a misfire- the DEVIL book has so many stories and characters that may or may not fit/work in a 2 hr movie- but its a bold attempt either way. I will be up at 12:01 waiting for this one whenever it premieres (Friday?).
If it wasn’t for Ellroy, I would be right there with you on Pollack. The Heavenly Table is a masterpiece and I would love to see it on HBO over the course of 13 hours with all the brutality and sleaze.
HAHAHA i was going to add “Next to James Ellroy…” but then I remembered the last 3 books I read by HIM and realized I enjoy Pollock more now, currently, then I do JE.Don’t get me wrong- he’ll forever hold his place- but he’s dipped a little in recent titles, though in fairness he’s also a REALLY odd duck. DRP seems like a normal, nice guy with a dark twisted writing mind- but he’s not as inherently unlikable as JE by any means.
Aw yeah, Pokey Lafarge
I watched it last night and it’s a huge waste of talent. It doesn’t reveal it’s point until the last 30 seconds, and the previous 2 hours are just a slog of nearly entirely unconnected stories. Magnolia did this “Microcosm of violence” and breaking the cycle thing so much better.
This is one of the better reviews—it seems to be really splitting critics (55 on Metacritic) which isn’t too surprising. I love the cast and have bee meaning to read the book for a while now, but I admit currently I’m not really in a rush to see something this divisive that is also a long slog filled with nihilism and violence…
this southern gothic movie was extremely up my alley. like Undertow mixed with an even-more-violent A Place Beyond The Pines (both extremely underrated). every one is great, yes, even Pattison who probably will get lambasted but it just worked for me. A-.
Yeah, the narrator was pretty much unnecessary, no matter if he’s the author of the original novel, and the pacing seemed quite a way off – but I liked it anyways. For me, it was like the bastard child of The Killer Inside Me and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints – which isn’t a bad thing. Also: this is one of the few ‘big cast’ films where not one performance felt out of place.
i once read something about how if a movie (as well as many plays & stories) has a narrator, it’s a sign of weakness in the writer – not trusting her/his audience to figure it out for themselves.
The cast was the draw, but the storytelling came off like a bag of tricks. How many times can you freak the viewer out before they catch on? I stuck it out but was left with a feeling that my time had been wasted.
I for some reason assumed that it was going to turn out that one of the people in this movie was actually the devil in some sort of Twilight Zone twist and then the rest of the town was going to have to band together to force him out but that is not what happened. That’s my fault.
awwwww, the dog…