No./5 The starry film that dives into darkness
Director Antonio Campos on THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME — his brutal, sprawling, A-lister-packed thriller
RANDALL POSTER, THE music supervisor who works on all of Wes Anderson’s films, has an eye for a good story. A few years ago, he read American author Donald Ray Pollock’s The Devil All The Time, a sprawling Southern saga featuring fractured characters trying to make sense of their place in the world. Awful, violent, traumatic events occur. Poster, with his producer hat on and seeing cinematic potential, did not go to Wes Anderson with the book. This needed someone who would wholeheartedly embrace the darkness.
Antonio Campos has previous. His debut film, 2008’s Afterschool, is an unsettling study of adolescent wrongness. 2012’s Simon Killer is a bleak journey into the mind of a sociopath, while 2016’s Christine dramatised the psychological difficulties endured by reporter Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself during a TV broadcast in 1974. It’s a disturbing, powerful body of work, so Campos makes perfect sense for The Devil All The Time. “I loved the book,” Campos says. “I love Southern Gothic and I love noir, and this is a wonderful intersection of them. I’ve been more and more drawn to stories revolving around faith, the struggle with faith, and exploring the darker sides of faith. So it just had me.”
Set over three decades in the mid-20th century and involving various stories about myriad characters, an adaptation presented clear challenges, which Campos and his brother Paulo, who wrote the screenplay with him, seized upon.
They wanted, says Campos, “a multi-strand narrative in which you could spend time with each character and not know how everything is connected, but the threads organically find each other”. It doesn’t sound easy. “It definitely wasn’t easy!” he laughs. “It was a really complicated set of stories to weave together.”
The result, though, has a wonderful fluidity, the narrative ratcheting up despite non-linear zig-zags. Bill Skarsgård comes in first, as Willard Russell, a war veteran desperately trying to conquer his wife’s cancer; later we meet Tom Holland, as Willard’s grown-up son Arvin; Jason
Clarke and Riley Keough’s serial-killer lovebirds; Sebastian Stan’s cop with an agenda; and Robert Pattinson’s sketchy preacher. God looms over them all, for better or worse. Mostly worse. The cast clearly relished their roles, and Holland in particular gets to play in a world we haven’t seen him in before. “I don’t believe he does anything without diving headfirst into it and giving himself completely over to it,” says Campos.
Any Holland fans watching the film in the hope of enjoying some friendly neighbourhood exploits are in for a shock: despite a mischievous strain of black humour, some of it may well scar you. But it’s all there for good reason, says Campos. “There are dark things that happen. But I think that experiencing darkness is not a bad thing when it’s done in the right context. The film is not glorifying violence; it’s trying to understand where it comes from. It’s trying to understand its connection — especially in this country — to faith, and people abusing the power of faith. You can present the world with rose-tinted glasses, but that’s not truthful, nor is it raising any questions.”
And despite its period setting, the film has currency. “In the last four years there’s a madness that’s been building up, and this confusion around this administration,” says Campos. “It is a period story but it feels very relevant to the world that we live in. It’s hard to write something in a time like this without elements of the world that you’re in making its way into it.” Where Campos goes after this? God only knows. THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME IS ON NETFLIX FROM 16 SEPTEMBER