The Devil All The Time (2020)
Review of The Devil All The Time (2020), directed by Antonio Campos
I will admit without an ounce of shame that I watched this movie immediately after watching a compilation of Robert Pattinson doing accents for ten minutes. I heard his very thick, nasally West Virginia/Appalachia accent in that one scene where he’s talking about the chicken organs and was sold almost immediately on this film.
Then I realize almost everyone in this film that’s a major character weren’t even from the United States originally and was even more mind blown. Most of them nailed the accents.
The Devil All The Time is also the first-ever movie I’ve seen with Tom Holland. You’re all probably like how has this girl not seen any Marvel movies lately, but, to be honest, those kinds of movies aren’t my cup of tea. But The Devil All The Time? Oh man, this was a very strange but also very fucked up movie.
Let’s dive into this review.
In the rural United States, violence and loss create intergenerational trauma.
The Devil All The Time is a split chronology, but first, we must begin at the beginning. Willard Russell, a colonel in World War II, finds a fellow soldier skinned and crucified and decides to put him out of his misery.
That sets the tone for the rest of the movie almost immediately because as Willard comes home to the American South, we see him fall in love with a local girl and settle down with a kid. We juxtapose his story with a very passionate preacher named Roy.
These two stories sneak along without intersecting. As Willard’s wife becomes ill with cancer, we see a scene where he takes his son, Arvin, on a truck ride where Willard beats up people who have wronged him.
He tells his son to be willing to use violence to correct wrongs in the world, which will come into play majorly later in the movie. But when Willard’s wife dies, he slits his own throat, leaving Arvin to discover his father’s body and become an orphan.
At the same time, Roy dumps poisonous spiders on his face during a sermon and then begins to hallucinate. He murders his wife thinking that God will resurrect her, but then flees after it doesn’t happen.
It is here he meets a couple that are actually serial killers, as they try to force him to have sex with the woman, Sandy, but the man shoots Roy after he refuses to do so. The story then combines as the children of these couples, Arvin and Leonora, are brought in under the same household as orphans. They become each other’s siblings.
In the present day of the film, Arvin and Leonora have grown up with the trauma of never having parents (in Leonora’s case) and having discovered a father’s body (in Arvin’s case).
The inciting incident here is that a new traveling preacher from Tennessee is in town. Their grandmother, known as the best cook in town, makes the preacher chicken livers. We see how Arvin has taken his father’s lesson of violence seriously, as he beats up local boys that have harrassed Leonora. This is the beginning of the spiral of violence this film is going to go through.
The traveling preacher, Preston (Pattinson), is disturbing. His nasal voice immediately alerts the viewer that something is off about him, but as he eats the town’s food, he goes on a self-indulgent rant disguised as a sermon. He thinks that the chicken livers are actually delicious, so he delivers a sermon about how these are organs and how everyone else should eat the other food, leaving the grandmother in tears, but then he has done this so he could just eat all of it for himself.
The plot thickens when he engages in a sexual relationship with Leonora, leading to her suicide and Arvin’s murder of the preacher. This then leads Arvin to meet the serial killers and then kill them, then the cop that comes looking for Arvin (who happens to be Sandy’s brother). It’s here when I began to notice themes of male redemption for female suffering.
Almost all of the women in this film have been wronged in some sort of way. Leonora commits suicide after getting pregnant with the preacher’s kid. Arvin’s mother dies tragically young of cancer. Roy’s wife (and Leonora’s mother) is murdered by Roy. The male serial killer is the one who actually wants to kill people, as Sandy wants to get out of this arrangement. And then there’s the grandmother, who has now lost all of these people.
The male characters also play this role of needing to protect in some way, if that makes sense? For example, Arvin feels the need to go down this spiral of revenge. Sandy’s brother wants to get revenge.
The women are all powerless to their situations, leading to this need for a strong female character. Sandy wants to be this character as she plots to kill her counterpart in the murders, but then she doesn’t actually get to do anything. She is killed by Arvin, condemned to a feminine fate of suffering for the actions of men.
World-building was fascinating in this film. I was very into how the script wove in these two different stories in a way that made them very interconnected when at first they seemed like they didn’t relate at all. I see why it would cut between the story of Roy and Willard so suddenly at first, but I will say it was kind of disorienting.
Overall Thoughts
I think it’s an interesting film. It shows how the trauma filters down between generations; Arvin would’ve been a completely different boy if he hadn’t had his father die like that. If the father hadn’t killed himself in a way that his son would find the body, I think Arvin wouldn’t have the capacity to kill.
He was slightly desensitized to the notion of death and thus saw the concept of an eye for an eye, a life for a life. That’s why he goes and kills the preacher: for revenge. He even completes the story of revenge for Leonora, not just for the baby and the preacher, but also for her father.
I don’t think he knows that’s Leonora’s father, which makes that an interesting thread, but it adds a sense of completing the story. Although it ends on an uncertain note, the story is done.
