The first voice you hear in The Devil All the Time is author Donald Ray Pollock, who wrote the source material for Antonio Campos’ film. Pollock himself narrates the film in warm, soothing tones that give the movie a storybook quality without ever intruding on the drama. Pollock’s evocative narration aside, it’s easy to tell that the movie is based on a novel, with its extensive cast of characters and decades-spanning narrative, and director and co-writer Campos packs almost all of Pollock’s book into the 138-minute movie. The central figure in the story is Arvin Russell (Tom Holland), but he’s just one of many disreputable characters hanging around the rural towns in Ohio and West Virginia where the movie takes place. Holland, as the adult Arvin, doesn’t even show up until a third of the way through the movie.
Before that, the story focuses on Arvin’s father, Willard (Bill Skarsgård), who returns from military service in World War II to his hometown of Coal Creek, West Virginia, still dealing with the horrors he witnessed overseas. He falls instantly in love with waitress Charlotte (Haley Bennett) after just one meal at the diner where she works, and they marry and settle in the wonderfully named town of Knockemstiff, Ohio (a real place where Pollock grew up). Arvin is their son, and his father teaches him how to fight and how to pray, which seem to be the only things that Willard truly knows how to do. Charlotte dies of cancer when Arvin is still a boy, and that’s just the first of many tragedies to come in his life.
Young Arvin moves to Coal Creek to live with his grandmother, and he spends the next decade or so surrounded by unsavory characters, often outwardly upstanding men who prey on vulnerable women. There’s the traveling fire-and-brimstone preacher Roy Lafferty (Harry Melling), who covers himself in spiders to prove that God has cured him of arachnophobia, and who marries the meek Helen Hatton (Mia Wasikowska). There’s serial killer Carl Henderson (Jason Clarke), who uses his wife Sandy (Riley Keough) as bait to pick up young male hitchhikers, whom he photographs in sexual positions with Sandy, both before and after he kills them. There’s smooth-talking Rev. Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson), who takes advantage of teenage Lenora (Eliza Scanlen), Helen and Roy’s daughter. There’s the corrupt Sheriff Lee Bodecker (Sebastian Stan), who takes money from local criminals and turns a blind eye to whatever is going on with his sister Sandy and her husband Carl.
The stories of all of these characters are intertwined throughout the movie, and Arvin is eventually at the center of them all. Like his father, he has a short temper and is prone to violence, but unlike many of the men around him, he has a strong moral compass, and when he commits a violent act, it’s always in service of a greater good. Also like his father, Arvin isn’t a man of many words, but his convictions are strong, and Pollock’s narration fills in some of the emotional details without getting heavy-handed. Life in these small backwoods towns isn’t easy, and it’s no surprise that people give in to superstition or temptation or corruption, or all of the above. Pollock and Campos immerse the audience in this unique environment that sometimes feels entirely alien and other times feels like the truest representation of America.
The cast, full of actors known for blockbuster franchises, helps bring that setting to life, and while some of the characters are larger-than-life presences, they all fit perfectly within the world the movie creates. Clarke and Melling and Pattinson are all memorably unsettling in their own ways, and while Teagardin isn’t a killer, he may be the creepiest of them all for the way he coldly evokes God in dismissing the victims of his horrible acts. Although Arvin is the main character, Holland spends much of his screen time reacting to other actors’ domineering performances, but he still holds the movie together with Arvin’s quiet dignity. The female characters never get the same spotlight as the reprehensible men, and Wasikowska in particular is wasted in a small role, but Keough gets a few entertaining moments of assertiveness as the slightly more thoughtful half of the serial-killing couple.
As the characters weave in and out of each other’s stories, The Devil All the Time is never less than fascinating, tying domestic horrors to the horrors going on overseas, first in World War II and then in Vietnam, the specter of which hangs over most of the movie’s second half. While one hopes that Pollock didn’t grow up around people quite as sinister as some of these characters, he certainly knows the culture of these forgotten backwaters, and his voice is a stabilizing presence as he uses his words to paint a picture every bit as vivid as what’s onscreen.
With films including Afterschool, Simon Killer and Christine, Campos has specialized in portraits of violently disturbed people that present their characters without moral outrage. Here, he gets a whole ensemble cast of such people, and he makes them all into indelible screen presences. You may not want to travel to Knockemstiff after watching The Devil All the Time, but you’ll never forget that it’s there.
Starring Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgård, Jason Clarke, Riley Keough, Robert Pattinson, Eliza Scanlen, Sebastian Stan, Harry Melling, Haley Bennett and Mia Wasikowska, The Devil All the Time premieres Wednesday, Sept. 16 on Netflix.