The Devil All the Time: Is the new Netflix movie worth watching?

Is The Devil All the Time worth watching on Netflix?

One of the more hazardous byproducts of the entertainment industry’s ballooning capital on larger-than-life content, superhero or otherwise, is today’s audience’s steadfast amalgamation of actor and notable role. Case in point: some people may watch Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time, out on Netflix today, and find themselves unwilling to see Tom Holland as anything else but Spider-Man.

And with an ensemble cast, this effect risks compounding, seeping into scenes (“Look, it’s Spidey standing off with Edward Cullen!” “It’s Pennywise staring down Dudley Dursley from Harry Potter!”), threatening to taint the clarity of a movie or television show’s morals.

It feels inescapable at times, but The Devil All the Time certainly makes a run for it. The new Netflix movie douses itself in an Iñárritu-esque sorrow that hardens its perspective on humanity, resulting in a dour thesis on evil that mostly works.

The Devil All the Time review

Based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time primarily revolves around the Russell family, made up of WWII veteran Willard (a compelling and surprisingly mature Bill Skarsgård), his wife Charlotte (Haley Bennett) and son Arvin. Frequently jumping between location and time, their family comes into contact with a host of other people, including a serial-killing husband and wife duo, the family of an unorthodox preacher, and a corrupt police sheriff. The Russells (mainly Arvin, played earnestly by Tom Holland) slowly learn more about the festering, evolving nature of sin and the various ways with which to combat its person.

Having read the book, I was most intrigued by how Campos would weave the seedy, grimy qualities of Pollock’s plotlines into engaging drama. Pollock’s characters all have at least some mud on their souls, despite their best and worst intentions. The acclaimed writer does a masterful job of dabbing back and forth between their lives, which range from thoroughly pitiful to hopelessly determined. There’s a timbre to his anecdotal, meandering prose of “out of the frying pan and into the fryer,” and Pollock accomplishes this through his characters’ tendencies to pause from their actions and reminisce on malice-tinged memories before buckling down and weathering the present storm.

In his translation, Campos enlists an ensemble cast of established stars and prolific up-and-comers. Holland leads the way, imbuing a much-desired gravitas to the film’s most developed figure. At his side are Robert Pattinson’s despicable preacher Teagardin and Riley Keough’s murderous wife Sandy Henderson, the former taking the biggest swing on screen this side of Daniel Craig in Knives Out, and the latter delivering a tightly-wound, subtler portrayal to which The Devil All the Time would have done better to devote more screen time.

On that note, for all its strengths in boasting a roster of some of the most in-demand actors of today, the movie gets hung up on many snafus in the book-to-screen adaptation process. Most egregious is the VO problem – its third-person narrator (Pollock himself) speaks up at inopportune moments to divulge information that is at its best thematically objective, and at its worst laughably redundant. Furthermore, the film contains a disappointing imbalance of character development, including some misguided losses and additions of key traits, that would have allowed The Devil All the Time to dissect its themes more pointedly. The soundtrack is just plain weird at times, providing ill-fitted upbeat cues that simply don’t gel with the film’s score, pacing, and overall tone.

Still, Campos, as in his show The Sinner, at once pairs intimate camera angles with rustic production design in a portrait of troubled individuals in the rural United States. Even though The Devil All the Time does snag on some structural weeds, its assured acting performances and unshowy direction result in a bristling portrait of Gothic realism that should affect most everyone.