Review: The Devil All the Time Offers a Surplus of Southern-Fried Misery Porn

Throughout, the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot.

The Devil All the Time
Photo: Netflix

The title of Antonio Campos’s The Devil All the Time proves to be an all too honest one. Over the course of 138 numbing minutes, Campos springs a catalogue of cheap horrors, offering a riff on the Psycho device of killing the protagonist unexpectedly—on repeat. So many potential heroes or antiheros die “unexpectedly” that the film becomes a kind of riff on the story of Abraham, crossed with the notion of the sins of the father coming to visit his children regardless of what the bible says. This patchwork theme might’ve had a ghoulish tang if Campos had a sense of humor or interest in his characters. Instead, the filmmaker fashions redundant misery porn steeped in Southern-fried clichés.

The Devil All the Time is adapted, by Campos and brother Paulo Campos, from a 2011 novel by Donald Ray Pollock, who narrates the film. Campos is probably aiming for a poignant alienation effect, giving voice to characters who barely know their own feelings, a la Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Todd Field’s Little Children. For Kubrick, this device was a wicked joke on repression that grew devastatingly moving. For Field and Campos, it’s a way of signaling rarefied intentions that imparts already evident information. The characters in The Devil All the Time are so instantly, easily known that Pollock’s pseudo-profound Faulkner-by-way-of-Billy-Bob-Thornton prose becomes merely one of many failed indulgences. The lurid, shopworn events in this film are ludicrously unfit for Pollock’s sermonizing.

We learn via Pollock’s narration of two small towns in Ohio connected by contrivances. Returning home after serving in World War II, where he encountered a horror that temporarily disrupts his faith in Christianity, Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård) meets cute with a waitress in a diner, Charlotte (Haley Bennet), and marries her seemingly a few minutes later. We’re told nothing about Charlotte, who exists as an embodiment of Willard’s fantasy of stability after the war. Willard, however, is revealed to be easing back into his religion, which grows obsessive over the years, especially after he bears the first of the film’s 100 or so calamities. In considerable pain, Willard puts his nine-year-old son, Arvin (Michael Banks Repeta), through unforgivable anguish, failing whatever gauntlet he perceives the lord to have thrown down.

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For a while, The Devil All the Time skips around between time frames. As Arvin is conditioned to be a hard-nosed survivalist, a child roughly his age, Lenora (Ever Elouise Landrum), is orphaned via two crisscrossing acts of religious severity, at the hands of her unhinged preacher father, Roy (Harry Melling), and a pair of drifting fundamentalist sex-photographer serial killers, Carl and Sandy Henderson (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough), who met at the same diner and on the same day as Willard and Charlotte did. The upshot of the first hour is that Arvin and Lenora eventually come to grow up in the same household in the 1960s and are played as teens by Tom Holland and Eliza Scanlen, respectively. At this point, the film settles into a more-or-less singular narrative, with guest appearances by crazies from parallel scenarios.

The one form of suspense that The Devil All the Time authentically generates is curiosity as to what its general point might be. Given the preponderance of stereotypical religious fanatics on display, the viewer is again tempted to take the film as a put-on—a comic riff on the self-serving nepotism that religion often enables. The mind keeps wanting to turn this absurd roundelay into a comedy, as that interpretation gives the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and casts the mechanical narrative in a potentially lucid light.

But Robert Pattinson is the only person who seems to recognize this material for the hokum it is. Playing another of the film’s compromised preachers, indelibly named Preston Teagardin, Pattinson struts his tail feathers, pushes his gut forward, and revels in his character’s smug debauchery. He understands the sensual wickedness of Southern Gothic tall tales, avoiding the stiff presentational acting of the majority of the cast—the sort of condescendingly “noble” acting that was ridiculed so astutely in Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

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As a character begins to kill a bunch of other characters, in the process uniting various story strands, one suspects that Campos is aiming for a Southern spin on Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a film that also attempted to affirm faith via the pleasures of narrative decadence. Tarantino may have created self-consciously iconographic characters, but he occasionally allowed them to breathe; in their vices they seemed, well, not human but alive with their creator’s obsessions. By contrast, every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.

Score: 
 Cast: Tom Holland, Eliza Scanlen, Bill Skarsgård, Haley Bennett, Robert Pattinson, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Mia Wasikowska, Douglas Hodge, Lucy Faust, Given Sharp, Michael Banks Repeta, Ever Eloise Landrum  Director: Antonio Campos  Screenwriter: Antonio Campos, Paulo Campos  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 138 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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