The Devil All the Time

Top-notch craftsmanship that skilfully handles the balance of the image accessibility, relying on a spatially distinctive framing and on dim lightning that irradiates a darkness similar to the one that can be found in the soul of the society it portrays. Antonio Campos really tries to imprint his specific signature on the visuals and stages the scenes with ingenuity and efficiency. The 1950s and 60s setting in an environment of misery and poverty, where the heroes often seek solace in prayer, looks very convincing and itself builds an atmosphere where the viewer is always ready for the ubiquitous evil. The period soundtrack also works well, it doesn’t stick out too much but completes the film’s aura, while also helping to tell a very complex story with many characters, whose fates must naturally cross paths, and actually do throughout. But even though the story is very interesting and quite rich in the individual conflicts, its development doesn’t have a very strong effect and at times it feels too mechanic and literal. There’s an omniscient narrator, who probably was meant to express a detached god’s perspective, but his role is exhausted soon after laying down the story and the characters. The story then shifts regularly between several main lines that are brought together in the final act, but, especially in the middle part, where the hero is finally established, it’s lacking a dominant narrative direction and impulse – it’s as if it was intentionally shuffling its feet on one spot so the viewer can absorb the ideas that have been sketched so far, but the problem in that sense is that the film is in fact too simple and interpretively bland to evoke those existential concepts. The cards are clearly laid in the middle, the sympathies must be directed at the main character, while the potentially ambiguous ones don’t have much room to affect the story (the again attractive Ms Keough), or lack a better portrayal (Sheriff Sebastian Stan), while the evil ones are downright bad. And even though I appreciate the straightforward questioning of the faith in God as a means to achieve inner peace, I think that for a greater catharsis, it lacked more coherent moral arguments that would provide less universal conflicts and dilemmas to the twists that often arise from the experiences and the beliefs of the characters. Despite all these weaknesses, The Devil All the Time is certainly effective as a jigsaw-puzzle full of interesting images and characters that may be lacking a deeper insight and humanity, even (with the exception of a couple of wisecracks the film doesn’t have any humour, it’s only bleak), but still has the praiseworthy mark of the atmospheric fade-out effects and with a period setting that is not only for effect, but to provide a logical sequence of events that makes sense and holds the attention of the viewer at a decent pace, probably with the exception of the quieter middle part. Next to all the dumb action movies and cloying romantic stories on Netflix, this detour into the redneck world stands out very nicely and, if anything, it encourages to read the source book, which will certainly fix the psychological and argumentative shortcomings of the movie. 70% (09/19/2020) (less) (more)