Mark Reviews Movies: THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 15, 2020

While fighting in the Pacific theater during World War II, the father witnessed and, until his dying moments, could never forget a most gruesome sight. A marine, whose name was only known because of the dog tags hanging at his feet, had been crucified by the enemy.

The man, who would soon become a husband and the father of this story's eventual protagonist, couldn't look at another cross again without thinking of that sight and the horror that followed its discovery. He would never tell anyone about what he had seen, but in The Devil All the Time, we saw it, too. We also see how that scene and the father's reaction to it echo throughout the rest of this generations-spanning tale.

Co-writer/director Antonio Campos' film begins with that crucifixion and reaches its climax at the location of another. The schematic of all of this seems set in stone, as if written in the stars or foretold by some seer or written into the DNA of its characters.

Everything that happens here—and a lot does happen in this screenplay, written by the director and his brother Paulo Campos—is pointing forward, toward assorted deaths and murders and acts of self-defense and conflicts between people who are connected by some shared glance in someone else's past. At the same time, the Campos' screenplay (based on the novel by Donald Ray Pollock) is looking backward, too. After all, while people's actions may define who they are more than any thoughts or words, there are reasons that people think, talk, and act the ways they do. We learn these things over time from others and by way of seeing how things work in the world, and they're taught by people whose own learning and experiences in the world shaped them.

In a way, then, this story feels like a cosmic game of telephone, in which the stakes aren't just repeating a certain phrase. Here are people trying to find some answers and some sense of morality from the lessons of the past—lessons with mysterious origins, taught by people who have been traumatized, make mistakes, are certain their bad decisions are the correct ones, and are as in the dark about the answers of life as everyone else. When someone here does have a moment of enlightenment, staring up at the sky as if everything—every choice, every lesson, every deed—has fallen into place, it is often the final moment that person has.

This story's scope is considerable. It concerns three generations of assorted people, focuses keenly on two of those generations, and has a cast of characters whose importance is obvious from the start or whose purpose in the plot is either fleeting or, in some cases, delayed until the third act. We connect these dots, because the filmmaking is strong and confident, but we only come away with the answers we want, because the storytelling is wisely enigmatic.

At first, the tale focuses on Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård), who has returned from fighting in the Pacific and quickly makes a life for himself. He marries Charlotte (Haley Bennett), a pretty waitress who greeted him during his first taste of returning to normalcy. The two marry, have a son, and save up to buy a house in a little place in Ohio called Knockemstiff. When Charlotte becomes ill, Willard returns to a warped form of his religious roots, leading to a sacrificial ceremony that, like the crucified marine, will haunt the experiences of his son.

Meanwhile, Helen (Mia Wasikowska), an orphaned young woman whom Willard's mother (played by Kristin Griffith) wanted her son to marry, meets and falls for a fire-and-brimstone preacher named Roy (Harry Melling). They have a daughter, and one day, after having some kind of revelation, Roy takes Helen for a ride to the woods. They wouldn't find her body for seven years, and as for the preacher, he has a run-in with Carl (Jason Clarke) and Sandy (Riley Keough), a married pair of traveling serial killers.

The significant pieces of this story—from the extended prologue to the main story, which features the adult children of these players—are shown, and the little details are told by way of narration (provided, quite generously, by the source material's author, whose bass register and down-home drawl feel like a bit of warmth amidst the violence that's unfolding). The narration here doesn't explain what we know or get in the way. Indeed, it enlightens us about things we couldn't possibly know about these characters, either because they're usually quiet or because people don't provide a running monologue as their life is about to end.

The central story concerns Arvin (Tom Holland), Willard and Charlotte's son, and his adopted sister Lenora (Eliza Scanlen), Helen and Roy's daughter, as each one follows the examples set by his father and her mother. Of central importance is Lenora's eventual relationship with Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattison), the town's new preacher, a judgmental hypocrite.

Bad decisions, betrayals, and violence are inevitable. That's the way of this place, because it is populated by people who have only learned from bad decisions, betrayals, and violence. A father teaches his son to wait for the right time to enact the proper justice, so the son does. A dead mother only had the time for her story to be about erroneously trusting a charismatic man of faith, so the daughter follows suit.

Does the film have anything bigger or grander to say about these things? It doesn't, but that also doesn't minimize the haunting and haunted impact of The Devil All the Time. Everything does come together by the end, but with the story's attention set so squarely on what and how these characters have learned, the results feel equally natural and fated.

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