The Devil All the Time

The name, the marketing, the little snippets Netflix plays if you let the menu sit on this film, it all goes toward making this movie seem intense and gripping, possibly bending towards horror a little bit. So you'll be surprised to find that this movie is a slow-burn, southern-fried psychological thriller/tragedy, told in a small-scale Robert Altman "here's a big cast, see how they intersect in the end" style. The movie takes place over the course of about 18 years, from 1947 to 1965, following the lives of about 8-10 people in two small towns, one in West Virginia and one in Ohio, and how they connect. It's virtually impossible to review the plot of the movie without giving away a lot of its details, so I won't spend much effort on it. Suffice to say that this is a movie that indulges in its runtime, letting the plot get to a boil as slowly as it likes. But it never feels dragged out or padded; every minute, every character and every plot development matters in this movie. It's a movie that, story-wise, requires patience and investment. The acting is, for the most part, phenomenal. I'd not seen Tom Holland in a non-Spider-man setting before this, and ... this boy is gonna be HUGE, lemme tell ya. This kid has IT. The rest of the cast -- Sebastian Stan, Jason Clarke, Robert Pattinson, Eliza Scanlen, Haley Bennett -- are outstanding as well. If there's a negative, I'd say it's Riley Keough, who I find to be average at best. Not bad, just nothing special. Regardless, just about everybody pulls their weight and then some. You will NEVER forget Robert Pattinson in this, no matter how much you want to. Every bit of the direction and score is finely crafted to suit the slow-burn, southern feeling to the movie. The score is sparse, mostly piano, a little guitar, and minimal orchestral backing. It's at times haunting, chilling, melancholy, and foreboding, but never intrusive. When you think of the best scores, movies like Indiana Jones, Star Wars or Jaws might come to mind, but I prefer to think the best scores supplement the movie without being their own character, and that's what this movie does. Likewise, the direction is subtle, under-stated, never flashy or melodramatic. You won't find massive sweeping crane shots, flashy series of cuts, or overly stylized shots. It's intimate, exactly what it needs to be to sell the story without getting in the way. The one thing this is not is a date movie or a "let's snuggle on the couch" movie. This is dark. The kind of dark where there's no such thing as a happy ending. This isn't a Hollywood movie. This is a movie about human beings and their lives, and like real life, it's messy and occasionally ugly. That is this movie. But if this movie ended with "and they all lived happily ever after", it would be a fraud. This movie needs an untidy ending. It may not be how you want things to end, but it's the ending that makes sense and feels earned, so you won't be disappointed, by any of it.