By Mick LaSalle

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