Voicework aside, and the apparently unreleasable disaster of a movie with Daisy Ridley too, Chaos Walking, it’s good to be able to get a look at Tom Holland outside of playing Spider-Man. The Devil All the Time gives us Robert Pattison as well, and everything he accompanies lately is fire; after The Lighthouse, before The Batman, and in the midst of Tenet, which I’m still yet to see (sigh!).
At the centre of this ever-winding narrative, is Arvin Eugene Russell (Tom Holland); an orphaned child living in 1960s West Virginia, with his adoptive grandmother and sister Lenora Laferty (Eliza Scanlen). Both Arvin and Lenora find themselves together following tragic and mysterious circumstances regarding their parents respectively. These are good church-going people; whose lives get turned upside down by the arrival of a sleazy Reverend, Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattison), to their small country town. At the same time and elsewhere, Lee Bodecker (Sebastian Stan) is a corrupt police Sherriff out to continue his grasp on power at the upcoming election, and nothing is off limits. And serial killers Carl Henderson (Jason Clarke) and Sandy Henderson (Riley Keough) patrol the highways of the south, looking for hitchhikers to make for their victims. Bill Skarsgard, Haley Bennett, Mia Wasikowska and Harry Melling round out a star-studded cast, as the young one’s parents, as we see what has happened to them at the beginning of the movie. The movie is directed by Antonio Campos.
The Devil All the Time is not an endorsement for religion – far from it. Nearly every character we see has their sense of right and wrong coded through the lens of Christianity and has it warp against them. The consequences of their folly are gruesome; suicide(s), murder, sexual coercion and animal sacrifice among them. If you’re looking for a family friendly experience and you’ve stopped here, jog on. This movie pulls out all the stops to communicate how senile religion can be, and personally, if it had come out twenty years ago it might’ve been poignant. But you only need to brush up on the motives or suicide bombers, or recall the priest epidemic uncovered in the early 2000s to understand how corruptible religion can be. From where I’m coming from, picking on religion now is pretty low-hanging fruit; it’s all been said before. Nonetheless, that’s not an indictment on the quality of this film – The Devil All the Time is certainly potent at providing examples to get its message across, and the calibre of actors gives the production extra credit.
Ironically, for a story set in America’s south, there’s hardly an American in it – Tom Holland, Robert Pattison, Harry Melling, Bill Skarsgard, Eliza Scanlen, Mia Wasikowska and Jason Clarke all hail from across the pond and beyond; that 7/10 of the primary cast! Tom Holland must’ve found the black Spider-Man suit, because he’s a little angry sod in this movie. It’s easy to see what makes him great in the Marvel franchise though, because his wide-eyed desperate moments make for his most convincing scenes, or at least most recognisable. Does he do enough to announce himself as actor on his own two feet? Probably not… Making Scanlen a redhead was such a confusing choice for me, considering Haley Bennett is the only other redhead in this movie, and she plays Arvin’s mother. I’m just so happy that Scanlen is blowing up in a big way, following on from Little Women and the miniseries Sharp Objects – Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! – yet, apart from Holland, this isn’t really a movie to highlight performance a great deal, since there’s a lot of small moments going on at once. I liked Sebastian Stan, Melling and Paterson though – Stan’s slimy cop might have cotton wool buds in his mouth like Marlon Brando did in The Godfather, puffing out his cheeks, me thinks.
Prepare for a patient build-up as the movie gets going, like a steam train leaving the station and hoping to start an exciting journey – in other words, it can be boring. The movie labours to explain how Arvin and Lenora came to be orphaned, and it takes some time to figure out who or what might prove the overall focus of the tale. Without knowing anything about this movie beforehand, it almost sets up like a predestined romance, as we learn about Arvin and Lenora’s young lives equally, and whilst the movie proves to be something different, I still think the structure was a deliberate replication. Even setting the movie in the south, which sometimes comes with the connotations of freedom, wide open spaces, and simple living, juxtaposes the ghoulish horror in the lives we see. Instead, The Devil All the Time is nearly more an anthology film, with many separate stories around the same theme of the condemnation of religion, with what I’ll deem, the voice(over) of God, tying it all together. It’s only in the last act, that the established characters intermingle, and even that, by then, follows a foreseeable through line that comes without the merit of shock value. At least when Larenz Tate ends up riding alongside Ryan Phillippe in the infamous 2006 Best Picture winner Crash, you don’t see it coming. In the end, The Devil All the Time reminded me most of Lawless, in tone and ruthlessness; a 2012 movie with Tom Hardy and Shia LeBeouf that I don’t recall too fondly.
After providing many hopeless scenarios of where a misguided faith in God can lead you, the movie concludes with a unique story of man conquering against the evils around him. I never found the themes appealing, and once the end became predictable, I, disappointingly, was running out the clock. As far as competency goes, the movie does prove effective; quite simply, despite the best intentions of feeble and desperate souls, the devil be everywhere, all the time.
2.5
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Best movie i have ever seen !