Dark, interweaving stories about faith, chance, innocence, and corruption that spring from the most corrupted part of the human soul.
West Virginia… WWII is over, the soldiers are back, and the Willards, not from West Virginia, have trouble adapting. As if the war hadn’t done enough damage, understanding the Lord’s mysterious ways led people to be… set in their own ways. This result brings irony and nemesis, a rhetorical device and a goddess from ancient Greece, which civilisations have been stumbling upon in numerous shapes and forms for millennia.
Almost an hour into the film, the new generation takes over the torch and builds on that wretched foundation, paving the path for and giving birth to menace and hypocrisy, two human “qualities” that the ancient Greeks “saw”chewing up man’s soul like locus. And only one offspring can come out of such a sorrowful family tree… Tragedy!
Writer/director Antonio Campos, co-writer Paulo Campos, and editor and wife of the former Sofía Subercaseaux put their heart and soul into the film. The Devil All the Time has two strong suits. One is the narrative: the exchange between the omniscient narrator, who speaks people’s minds and connects interweaving stories, and the interchangeable restricted narration between the heroes and villains and the audience.
The second one is the phenomenal casting: Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Haley Bennet, Eliza Scanlen, Mia Wasikowska, Harry Melling, and Robert Pattinson. And guess what, most of them are not even Americans. Excellent chemistry between the actors and amazing work with the dialect coaching. Most of the cast and crew have worked together in other films before, with the most notable collaboration being Holland, Stan, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who’s wearing the producer’s hat – MCU. Donald Ray Pollock, the author of the homonymous novel, gets a special reference for voicing his first-ever narration in the film.
I guess, in life, what goes around comes around. And The Devil all the Time is no short of literature on screen, believing, and strongly indicating it in the denouement, that we are trapped in an indissoluble delusion that we can run away from ourselves.
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Solidarity for all the innocent lives who suffer the atrocities of war!
Stay safe!
