That worldview arises from author Donald Ray Pollock, who not only wrote the 2011 novel that inspired the film (Campos and his brother Paulo Campos co-wrote the adaptation) but also lent his own voice as the film’s narrator.
I’m not sure how to classify the gun-toting creep with the cuckold fetish, except to note that is less an outlier than a standard bearer, the nastiest distillation of this movie’s relentlessly nasty worldview. You might say that sin is the movie’s true star: A cop serves his greed, a preacher indulges his lust and a young man unleashes his wrath.
The sins of the fathers are passed down with both a solemn hand and a diabolical chuckle in “The Devil All the Time,” a viciously coiled study in the banality of evil, the abuse of power and the diminishing returns of screen violence.Ĭutting a bloody swath across Ohio and West Virginia in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, director Antonio Campos (“Christine”) weaves many tangled webs of lust, deceit, murder and suicide around a large ensemble of actors, including Tom Holland, Eliza Scanlen, Robert Pattinson and Riley Keough.
