The Devil All the Time

I liked it quite a lot, especially because it is one of those dark films that draw you into a dirty, sick world full of bad people, but without completely losing the emotional thread. It is not a comfortable film, nor a kind one, nor an especially light one: it is a gothic melodrama of violence, religion, guilt and survival, with characters who seem condemned before they even make their own decisions. And yet, it caught me.
What interested me most was Arvin’s story. Inside a tale full of fanatics, predators, false saints, corrupt cops and broken families, he works as someone trying to survive in a world that seems determined to rot everything it touches. I cared about his rage, his pain and the way he carries an inheritance of violence he has not chosen, but which ends up marking every step he takes.
Tom Holland surprised me in a good way. I had him very much associated with another kind of character, younger and brighter, and here he sustains a much drier, more contained and more painful register. He does not need to exaggerate for you to understand Arvin’s anger or that feeling of a boy who has learned too early that goodness, in a place like this, can be a way of becoming defenseless. His performance seems to me one of the reasons why the film works.
I also liked Robert Pattinson, although he plays in a much more twisted register. His preacher is repulsive, affected, manipulative, one of those religious figures who use faith as a disguise for perversion and abuse. The film is very clear in its view of religious fanaticism, but not from a cold thesis; rather, by showing how certain sacred words can become an excuse for cruelty, desire, power and impunity.
The atmosphere seems very powerful to me. Everything has the feel of a rotten deep America, of small towns where violence is inherited, poverty presses down and religion is mixed with fear, guilt and superstition. There are churches, roads, bars, humble houses, woods and rooms where it always seems something bad can happen. The film is not looking for clean beauty, but for a rough, almost sticky beauty that fits very well with what it tells.
It is true that it is excessive. There are many characters, many misfortunes, many deaths and a great deal of accumulated sordidness. At some points you can feel that it wants to fit too much novel into a single film, and that makes certain plots seem more sketched than developed. At times the parade of misery can almost become heavy, as if every new character had to bring their own damnation under their arm.
But despite those excesses, I found it magnetic. The film has something of a dark feuilleton, a rural tragedy, a poisoned moral tale. It can be lurid, yes, but I did not feel it was empty. I was interested in seeing how those lives crossed, how evil passed from one person to another and how Arvin tried to find a way out in the middle of a chain of violence that seemed never-ending.
The cast helps enormously. Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Eliza Scanlen, Harry Melling and the rest fill that universe with damaged, guilty or directly monstrous creatures. Not all of them have the same space or depth, but almost all contribute something to that feeling of a twisted world. It is a film very much built on atmospheres and presences, more than on perfectly balanced characters.
I also find it interesting that it does not turn violence into simple heroic spectacle. There are blows, shots and very harsh moments, but what remains is not a feeling of adventure, but of moral exhaustion. Violence here is a stain passed from parents to children, from believers to victims, from abusers to survivors. Arvin can defend himself, but that does not mean he comes out clean from what he lives through.
I do not think it is perfect. It has balance problems, a perhaps too-present narrative voice and a certain tendency to underline the darkness until everything seems condemned from minute one. Some subplots could breathe more and others may not be necessary. But its flaws did not push me out. On the contrary: I accepted that dense, fatalistic and slightly exaggerated tone because it fits the kind of story it wants to tell.
In the end, it remains for me a very notable, murky, intense and quite absorbing film. I liked it because it involved me, because it made me angry with many of its characters and because I followed Arvin’s survival with interest amid so much fanaticism, violence and moral misery. It is not a perfect work, but it is a powerful story, with great performances and an atmosphere of sin, dust and blood that is hard to shake off.