The Devil All the Time: Overly-violent, over-long and under-developed
Adapted from the acclaimed 2011 book of the same name (and featuring the author as its lyrical narrator) The Devil All the Time is not wasted potential so much as it is entirely a waste of time that would probably be better spent just reading the source material.
Tom Holland does his level best to ground and humanise the ultra-violent trappings of rural small-town America but he can only go so far with a bleak, under-developed script that offers little of interest but lots of slayings to titilate over.
The violence on display in the Netflix-backed ‘psychological thriller’ is overt and over the top but carries little of consequence to anyone but Holland’s Arvin Russell who attempts to navigate the bloodshed.
Arvin loses both his parents at a young age; his mother to cancer and his PTSD-afflicted, hyper-religious dad to suicide (but not before the latter has slaughtered and crucified his dog).
Meanwhile Lenora Laferty is born to Helen and evangelical preacher Roy. But a spider-bitten Roy goes mad and murders Helen believing he can resurrect her (spoiler — he fails).
Roy flees but is picked up by a pair of serial killers, leaving Lenora, like Arvin, an orphan. They then grow up together under the wardship of Emma Russell (Arvin’s grandmother) — the only female character given any depth in an under-developed script.
This introduction to the plot does not mention the sexual predator preacher, go into detail about those twisted serial killers or the corrupt police chief gunning for reelection.
Set in the real-life community of Knockemstiff in Ohio, where author Donald Ray Pollock was born and raised, the repeated motif of bloody violence brings to mind Cormac McCarthy but writer and director Antonio Campos has nothing new to say about it, just that people are bad and violence is in our nature.
The Wikipedia page for the film gamely touts that The Devil All the Time ‘examines themes of evil, religion, and the abuse of power in rural small-town America’.
But that’s not true — it features all those things but there is no stern examination of the themes or why that evil is so inherent in humanity.
The decision to weave together all the loathsome characters into one jigsaw narrative might have worked for the well-received book but with the film it instead removes any sense of mystery or danger.
The film aims to show us what can drive a well-meaning rural kid to murder (and leave us wondering if there’s any possibility of redemption) but despite being two-plus hours the characters get little-to-no space to articulate those points or ponder their gruesome, grizzly surroundings.
In its own way Devil reminds one of Zack Snyder’s all-style-no-substance Watchmen which substituted all the depth of the source material for more gore and violence.
It comes down to one of the main reasons why McCarthy’s acclaimed Blood Meridian has never made it to the silver screen: crime novels praised for their prose and not their characters or plot are very tricky to adapt. Hence why the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men works so well — it is based on a McCarthy a book built around stellar dialogue.
A cast of Holland, Robert Pattinson, Jason Clarke, Mia Wasikowska, Kristin Griffith and Sebastian Stan do their best to elevate the lacklustre script but in reality they’re given little original or interesting to work with, Stan in particular.
Beyond an intriguing cast there is little of note except perhaps a reminder of how blasé violence has become in film. And how violence is not enough for a story.
The Devil All the Time is now streaming on Netflix.
