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‘The Devil All The Time’ Review: Tom Holland And Robert Pattinson Walk On The Dark Side In Violent Netflix Thriller
It is a good thing there is a lot of narration explaining exactly what is going on from moment to moment in Netflix’s The Devil All the Time, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to tell the bad guys from, well, the really bad guys. But in adapting Donald Ray Pollock’s 2011 novel, Antonio Campos (who also directed) and Paulo Campos are so wedded to the prose of the book that they actually hired the author himself to do all the voice-over; it is the closest thing to a cinematic audiobook I have yet seen. Normally I would say I am not a fan of movies that feel inclined to tell us everything a character is thinking and doing, rather than letting them do that themselves, but after a while you get used to the device, and Pollock actually has just the right tone to pull it off.
WATCHGUIDE: The Devil All the Time
What makes this quite violent and often vile meller work as well as it does though is an A-list cast who gives it their all to sell this sordid stuff of a backwoods Southern setting where everyone appears to be indeed ingesting the Devil all the time. Just about every main character involved takes a walk on the dark side, in some cases the darkest side, of human nature. What Campos, a director drawn to dark subjects anyway (After School, Simon Killer, Christine) has cooked up is a stew of cynical Faithmeisters, serial killers, mentally damaged war veterans, their affected offspring, corrupt cops and delusional Bible belters. We have seen the stereotypes trotted out in various Hollywood versions of this kind of entertainment many times, often with racial overtones at the center, but in this case it is white guys vs themselves who behave in turn-your-head-inducing bloodletting in the name of God and all that is moral. Or not.
Spanning the years 1957-1965, the film sadly has resonance for now as this type of reprehensible human being is currently on display in this country. The actors are so good here they avoid turning their characters into one-dimensional heathens so that we can see beneath the surface, and it is awfully muddy down there.
