Details enhance ‘Devil All the Time’
Devil All the Time Rated: R for violence, bloody/disturbing images, sexual content, graphic nudity and language throughout. Running time: 138 minutes. Available on Netflix. ★★★ out of 4
With “Devil All the Time,” director Antonio Campos and co-writer Paulo Campos pull off a difficult achievement. They make a long and very good movie without relying on the usual things that hold together a lengthy narrative.
This movie is not, for instance, the story of a single person that wants something desperately and struggles to get it. It also doesn’t rely on some mystery or unanswered question to which audiences want to know the answer.
“Devil All the Time” is really a portrait of a place, told through the lives of several people across a span of about a dozen years, and the thing that makes it interesting — from start to finish — is that this place is so brutal and appalling and unexpected in its various cruelties that we cannot stop watching.
Based on the novel by Donald Ray Pollock, the story unfolds in the region surrounding Knockemstiff, Ohio, an actual town, in the years following World War II. Willard (Bill Skarsgard) comes back from the war with a case of undiagnosed PTSD, having seen atrocities, including the crucifixion of an American soldier. He wants to find peace in this rural place and turns to religion, but he seems to be fighting the devil all the time.
The role of religious faith in this rural environment is presented here as multifaceted. For some, like Willard, it becomes an organizing principle for the expression of a mental illness. For others, it’s a genuine source of comfort. And for still others, such as the town’s new reverend (Robert Pattinson), it’s a means of assuming status while taking advantage of others.
Pattinson is 34 now and gets more interesting every year. A decade ago, when he was playing the sensitive vampire in the “Twilight” series, he seemed like a romantic lead stuck in a bizarre and unflattering role. Now we can see that the reverse was true. Pattinson’s
natural affinity is for the bizarre and unflattering, and it was the romantic element in “Twilight” that made it, for him, such an uneasy and unintentionally hilarious fit.
In “Devil All the Time,” he is serpentine, repugnant and thoroughly fun to watch, someone we immediately identify as a phony. The only mystery to his character is just how evil he might be.
Knockemstiff comes across as an almost cursed place, where bad things happen to good people, where original thought is embarrassed out of existence, and where every form of thinking leads to some dead-end of faux-religious doctrine. Willard goes to a makeshift shrine to pray, and as he does a mosquito flies briefly into focus — something I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a movie. Here, everything, even the air, is full of nastiness.
Tom Holland plays Willard’s son, Arvin (in his adult incarnation), and it’s yet another reminder that actors are often much better than the opportunities they’re given. Until now, Holland has been the latest Spider-Man, all pathetic and eager, chipper and empty. But here he has to carry at least a third of a tough movie, playing a young man fighting his way through a host of sinister forces without any superpowers. Holland holds the screen like a real star. It’ll be sad to see him return to that superhero nonsense after having proved himself an actor.
Knockemstiff is hard on men and worse on women. Women appear here in subordinate roles, but all of them are vivid — Haley Bennett as Willard’s sweetnatured wife, Mia Wasikowska as the bright-eyed wife of a severely mentally ill man, and Riley Keough as the semi-reluctant partner of a serial killer (Jason Clarke). Keough is particularly interesting in the way she suggests a gradual and deepening corruption.
There are places that make no sense, but if you’re born into them you just think that the world is crazy — or that cruelty and madness aren’t crazy at all. Such places seem to have a force field around them that make them hard to leave. In “Devil All the Time,” leaving is the characters’ only path to safety, but it’s the one road they can’t see and don’t take.