Welcome to Memory Holed, a weekly column from MovieWeb deputy editor and film critic Britt Hayes (that’s me). Every week, I’ll revisit the movies (and occasionally TV shows) that were culturally relevant for a brief time before collapsing into obscurity. Whether they were notable for having high-profile casts, generating awards-season buzz, using popular IP, stirring controversy, igniting discourse, or any combination of the above, these movies have been deliberately erased from the pop-culture consciousness. In other words: they’ve been memory-holed.
The Devil All the Time is a movie that seems impossible to forget — once you’ve seen it. And a lot of people saw it: The Southern Gothic thriller, based on the novel by Donald Ray Pollock (who also narrates), became the most-watched film on Netflix in the first two days of its release. But that was in September 2020, during a period of time we’ve collectively memory-holed. Though I saw the film back then, and remember liking it (as much as you can like a movie this bleak and grisly), the details of its plot escaped me, the way so many details from that time have evaporated.
Still, it’s strange that a film toplined by Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Bill Skarsgård, and Sebastian Stan (this movie literally has all the guys) has been largely forgotten. Directed by Antonio Campos (who adapted Pollock’s novel with Paulo Campos), The Devil All the Time centers on a handful of characters whose lives intersect through a series of profoundly upsetting vignettes around rural Ohio. The story begins with Willard Russell (Skarsgård), a Marine who’s just returned home from the horrors of serving in World War II, where his company came upon a fellow soldier, skinned and crucified by Japanese soldiers, but still breathing. Willard, who shot and killed the man in an act of mercy, is understandably haunted by the memory.
This is not the worst thing that will happen to (or around) Willard over the course of the film, but it is essentially the inciting incident; the original sin of violence that his son, Arvin, will inherit.
Willard is a godly man who attends the local church led by an evangelical preacher named Roy Laferty (Harry Melling), who covers his head in poisonous spiders every Sunday to prove that his faith in God is justly rewarded. Roy marries a devout young woman named Helen (Mia Wasikowska), while Willard marries a young waitress named Charlotte (Haley Bennet). Both marriages end in gruesome violence, with Helen and Charlotte forced to endure the delusions of their respective husbands: Roy, whose faith has become inextricable from his narcissism, and Willard, who desperately uses his faith to justify increasingly horrible acts.
As The Devil All the Time progresses from the 1950s into the ’60s, the story pivots to a now-teenaged Arvin (Tom Holland) and Lenora (Eliza Scanlen), the daughter of Roy and Helen, who was adopted by Arvin’s grandma, Emma. Their church welcomes a new reverend, Preston Teagardin (a delightfully slimy Robert Pattinson), who replaces Roy’s theatrical poisonous spiders with venomous sermons. Preston employs a passive-aggressive, holier-than-thou style of preaching that wards off suspicion by pointing fingers, not unlike his modern conservative counterparts. The congregation greets him with a potluck feast, and Preston introduces himself by suggestively fingering Emma’s plate of chicken livers — which she was worried might reflect her lowly status. Preston promptly uses them to humiliate her, making a big show of eating the plate of organ meat while inviting his congregants to partake in the superior dishes made from more palatable and costly meats.
Around the periphery of this story lurk a pair of murderous lovers, Sandy (Riley Keough) and Carl (Jason Clarke), who traverse the rural roads in search of male hitchhikers to seduce and kill. Carl offers to take photos of the young men engaging in sexual acts with Sandy, keeping the photos as trophies. Sandy’s brother, a local Sheriff’s deputy named Lee (Sebastian Stan) who is desperate to win re-election, finds himself at the center of these intersecting stories. This sub-plot involving the killer couple and Lee is the film’s one point of weakness, and distracts from an otherwise cohesive narrative that observes a grim cycle of violence playing out as Arvin and Lenora come of age.
Otherwise, The Devil All the Time is a fascinating thriller in which the seemingly opposing forces of faith and violence collide, only to reveal themselves as inextricably linked. Much of the film’s brutality is perpetrated by men who weaponize faith — either consciously or subconsciously — to commit heinous acts. Always, there is a narcissistic aspect, whether it’s the prideful preacher who hides his sins behind a pulpit, or the father whose inability to process tragedy leads him to enact violence, disguised as sacrifice, that will have a profound impact on his son’s life.
Had Campos — a director I have long admired, from his unnerving debut, Afterschool, to the similarly provocative Simon Killer — excised the Sandy and Carl plot, he might have spent a little more time contemplating the women of The Devil All the Time. Wasikowska and Bennet are underutilized, and though Scanlen is given more screentime (in a disturbing plot that echoes her role in the underseen indie The Starling Girl), her character would have benefited from more interiority. The women of the film are largely depicted as good and kind, and they are made complicit by men who take advantage of their better qualities, including their faith, which isn’t corrupted by the violence that’s seemingly innate in their male counterparts.
The Devil All the Time ends almost as it begins, creating a sort of solemn ouroboros. As Arvin reflects on the preceding events and considers a near future in which he will likely join the military and be shipped off to Vietnam to fight in a war, just like his father. A life of pain and violence has prepared him for just that.
Maybe it’s not so strange that a film released on Netflix disappeared into the digital ether almost instantaneously, becoming relatively anonymous amidst a sea of mediocre Netflix Originals. The streaming business has successfully adopted and executed the same tech-industry strategies that are destroying the full spectrum of media, including movies and television, but also music, social media, and news. Corporations adhere to a rapid-growth mindset that prizes quantity over quality and short-term wins over long-term success, and employ inhumane language that reduces art to metrics and people — consumers, customers, viewers, readers — to “users.” There is no care in the release of a film like The Devil All the Time, which you can’t buy and own on physical media, and which only exists as a piece of digital ephemera, a number on a spreadsheet optimized to feed a bottom line.
It is violence, in a sense.
- Release Date
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September 16, 2020
- Runtime
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138 minutes
