The Devil All the Time is one of those titles that is clearly cropped from some larger context. It is in fact from a line in Donald Ray Pollock’s book: “It seemed to his son that his father fought the devil all the time.” It’s a statement of psychological torment and the lingering effects of trauma, but removed from the rest of the line, “the Devil All the Time” has no meaning. I can’t speak to Pollock’s 2011 novel, but for the 2020 film adaptation recently released to Netflix, this comprehensive (and grammatical) senselessness makes it the perfect title.
Directed by Antonio Compos and starring a weirdly impressive ensemble cast considering the material, The Devil All the Time is a relentlessly bleak portrait of a number of lives in rural Ohio in the decades following the Second World War. It is populated with monstrous characters seemingly in competition over who can be the worst human being and takes delight in the misery they inflict -like if you crossed Magnolia with one of those grisly Victorian penny dreadfuls and transplanted it in the American Northeast of the mid-twentieth century. It’s a thoroughly unpleasant movie, which is fine. What’s less forgivable is how meaningless it all is.
Narrated with an ironic folksiness by Pollock himself in a voice disturbingly reminiscent of Mitch McConnell, the film tells about five or six mostly overlapping stories across two generations around Knockemstiff, Ohio (which yes, is a real place) that occasionally intersect or are connected in unfortunate ways. There’s a traumatized Second World War veteran unsuccessfully trying to circumvent death in his life, his son desperate to prove his toughness and protect his adopted sister, a piously delusional preacher, a pair of necrophile serial killers, and a corrupt cop on the payroll of sleazy politicians. And the films’ most notable asset is how they cast each of these parts with prominent actors, some of whom are stepping significantly outside their type. Tom Holland is the starkest example of this, completely casting aside the nice and nerdy teen archetype he’s known for in Spider-Man movies in favour of a brutish and violent-minded country boy eager to join the army. It’s not a role that particularly suits him, he’s trying too hard, struggling with the accent, and though his character beats up and kills a number of people, he never sells it. Next to Caleb McLaughlins’ turn in Concrete Cowboy, which I saw recently, it’s not as strong a transition into an adult role.
His and the other performances, some good some bad, but each to the same impression of the regional accent (which ranges from slight to parody), are mostly lost to the subject matter and the novel opportunities it provides for the actors –many of whom seem to be in the film just to play something disturbing. Do you want to see Bill Skarsgård crucify a dog? How about Harry Melling dumping a box of spiders over his head? Would you like to watch Jason Clarke brutally murder a hitchhiker, or Robert Pattinson just be a paedophile? And to some degree it works, there’s a morbid interest in seeing these actors play despicable or deranged people –Melling, as he was in The Old Guard, is enormously fun for example. But there’s not much beyond the shallow gimmick. That seems particularly apparent in Sebastian Stans’ storyline, a little more removed from the others, which starts in a place of no consequence and ends in a place of even less. Ultimately, none of the stories amount to much of anything, and the characters themselves (with the possible exception of Hollands’ Arvin) are mere empty vessels for grimness and grisly deeds.
At least the male characters are. The female characters are too bereft of agency to even have that. Moreso, the film has a notably misogynistic attitude towards the women of its story. Not only are major actresses like Haley Bennet and Mia Wasikowska wasted in extremely insubstantial roles, but just about unanimously the women of this film, never the morally reprehensible figures their male counterparts are, are fridged in brutal ways. The particular fate of Eliza Scanlens’ young innocent especially is tinged with a cruel irony unbefitting the pleasure Pollock takes in describing it. The only woman in the movie allowed any semblance of a narrative of her own is Riley Keough’s unenthusiastic partner to Clarke’s perverse killer; though even she isn’t spared the bitter whims of this sexually toxic world.
There might be something to this, some comment or idea, but Pollock and Compos aren’t interested in it. The Devil All the Time has no statement, no identity beyond simple shock value and the gleefully inappropriate folkish whimsy apparent in the light musical motifs and over-abundance of banal narration. Plenty of opportunities present themselves for deeper thematic inspection or for some level of social, cultural, psychological, or religious interrogation, but the film avoids them every one. It doesn’t have anything to say on the subject of its’ characters’ evils beyond a possible sins-of-the-father convention or that human beings sure can be rotten sometimes. The movie can barely make the effort to even be nihilistic -that it seems is an identity too strong for it. Perhaps Compos thinks The Devil All the Time can get by on its’ subversiveness, but beyond the casting choices nothing in the film is all that subversive. It would need to be challenging first. This movie exists for the sake of its actors -a few of them anyway, to let them play up a kind of vileness they may not be expected to otherwise. There’s entertainment in that. But it’s the kind that derives from Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson trying to convey a tense situation in a church through goofy accents. It’s an amusement only, as vacant and fleeting as this entire movie.
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