Film Review: THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME (2020): Horror in 1950s Suburbia that is Frightening on Several Levels

The Devil All the Time Review

The Devil All the Time (2020) Film Review, a movie directed by Antonio Campos, and starring Donald Ray Pollock, Bill Skarsgård, Tom Holland, Haley Bennett, Kristin Griffith, Sebastian Stan, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Harry Melling, Pokey LaFarge, Eliza Scanlen, and Robert Pattinson.

The experience of watching Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time is frightening at several levels. Although the film belongs to the psychological thriller genre, the disturbing imagery and bottomless depths to which some of the characters sink almost give the film the feel of a Gothic horror show. The Devil All the Time successfully recreates the grim post-World War II atmosphere of obscure towns in Ohio and West Virginia, where the religious mania of certain individuals is only matched by their degree of moral dissolution. In other words, the main theme of this film is the stuff of spine-chilling nightmares. With no waking up.

Young Arvin Russell’s (Tom Holland) life seems to be dogged by the horrors experienced by his hyper-religious, war veteran father, Willard (Bill Skarsgård). In fact, this common theme of religious excess binds most of Arvin’s unpalatable experiences involving different people in his life. Some of the most powerful, and disturbing, imagery in the film involves religious fanaticism, with Willard finding a crucified soldier in the battlefield and discovering, to his horror, that the bloody ‘corpse’ is alive and shooting him dead to end his agony. This same Willard later performs a ‘blood sacrifice’ by killing Arvin’s beloved dog, Jack, and offering the animals’ body, impaled on a wooden cross, to God in exchange of the life of his wife Charlotte (Haley Bennett), who is dying of cancer. It doesn’t work. Charlotte dies. And Arvin ends up losing both his parents in a matter of days.

Then there is Roy (Harry Melling), a demented preacher, who unscrews an entire jar of spiders over his face to prove a point. The macabre image of spiders of various sizes crawling all over a living man’s face is a difficult one to erase from memory. It is bound to remain etched in the mind of viewers as one of the most disturbing scenes ever seen in a film. And Roy’s actions indirectly impact Arvin too.

However, in spite of severe childhood trauma, Arvin turns out to be a surprisingly good person, albeit one with a violent streak. But he is forced to make some pretty tough choices while trying to survive and protect the people he cares for.

One of his adversaries turns out to be Reverend Preston Teagardin, a sexual predator who takes advantage of Arvin’s adoptive sister. Every sick detail of Teagardin’s character is portrayed to perfection by Robert Pattinson, who apparently unveiled a surprise in the form of his Southern accent during the shooting of the film.

The film did have a couple of problems which are more a matter of opinion. First, the narrator sounds like someone who might be an actual character in the film but eventually doesn’t turn out to be so. This might have been okay for the book by Donald Ray Pollock, who, incidentally, is also the narrator in the film. But the screenplay could have adapted the narrator to be someone we see – such as Hank, a man Arvin remembers from his childhood in Knockemstiff, Ohio, instead of an anonymous voiceover.

Secondly, for a film with such an ambitious premise, the ending seems surprisingly glib. It almost seems as if the film’s talented cast and crew, after working till the end, suddenly lost energy and interest. And left Arvin thinking distractedly about what he will do with his life while he expresses gratefulness that someone ‘is giving him a ride’.

The darkness of the story almost engulfs you till you realize that after all, Arvin is still alive. The evil in the name of religion and collective corruption of a community does not succeed in destroying him although he does not exactly escape unscathed.

Rating: 7/10

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