Needless to say, Arvin is an orphan who grows up bitter and angry, left to be raised by his grandmother Emma (Kristin Griffith, here the maker of the best chicken liver in town, to her own downfall). His full-bodied and ultimately murderous submission to a lord’s will triggers a chain of horrific events that plunge “The Devil All the Time,” in its first scenes, into gothic horror, along with repeated flashes to soldiers crucified and skinned-alive during Willard’s scarring time in South Pacific World War II. Skarsgård’s subzero-blooded Willard Russell, barely here, is the film’s scariest character. It’s the late 1950s, and Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) is a jean-jacketed rebel with plenty of cause after his ill-fated parents (Bill Skarsgård and Haley Bennett) set him up for failure with a one-two-three punch of religiously charged trauma. “Two piddlin’ places” thwarted by “dumb luck” and “God’s intentions.” Sodom and Gomorrah? Old Testament vibes abound.
New Movies: Release Calendar for January 7, Plus Where to Watch the Latest FilmsĮvery IndieWire TV Review from 2021 So Far, Ranked by Best to Worst GradeĮmmy Predictions: Best Actress in a Comedy Series - The Smart Money's on SmartĪ disinterested narrator pitches us between the aptly named Knockemstiff, Ohio, and Cold Creek, Virginia. 'See for Me' Review: A Blind Assassin Is Born in IFC Midnight's Gripping Thriller A violent but soulless meditation on faith taken to harrowing extremes, “The Devil All the Time” hurtles toward a constantly-hinted-at awful endgame, but by the time the final crash arrives, well, thank God it’s over. “The Devil All the Time” has to juggle so many characters that it becomes incoherent and basically boring onscreen, bobbing more along the logic of “here’s this person, and then this person, and then this person, and then that person again” than that of a complex but well-flowing ensemble tragedy where the fates of disparate characters border one another, and then lock into place. More a pileup of scenes and tragedies strung together than the Altmanesque kaleidoscope of intersecting lives it could have been, this slog of an adaptation from Donald Ray Pollock’s terrific Appalachian gothic is dead from the start, with stars like Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson eagerly doing their best to resuscitate the corpse for a nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time.ĭirector Campos has excelled in mining the masculine and feminine in much smaller-scale movies like indies “Afterschool,” “Simon Killer,” and “Christine,” but that once nimble and focused approach - generally on films that chart an individual’s psychic unraveling into a murderer, sociopath, or suicide case - doesn’t translate successfully to a broader canvas.
There is no reason to care about anyone in Antonio Campos’ “ The Devil All the Time,” a sweaty, bloated mess of a movie that flushes a knockout ensemble down the drain.