The Devil All The Time

Tom Holland might be the main face on the posters and in the trailers of The Devil All the Time but he doesn't appear onscreen until the 45th minute of the movie and by that stage the people watching because of his Marvel work will feel like they've been hung, drawn and quartered. This is as far from your friendly neighbourhood spider man as you'll get these days. He's great as Arvin Russell but it's the pity the film doesn't reach his level.

Spiders. Suicide. All manner of crucifixion. Murder. Misery. Hate. Statutory rape. Just some of the horror in store for you in The Devil All The Time, the new Netflix adaption of Donald Ray Pollock's novel of the same name. It's a film that will give the Ohio & West Virginian tourist boards apoplexy and it's one that will probably give you a dose of the blues when the final credits roll on a film about the litany of sins tarnishing the souls of men. It's the intertwining story of the inhabitants of a town called Knockemstiff. Willard (Bill Skarsgård) the returning soldier haunted by what he's seen in the Pacific theatre, his wife Charlotte (Haley Bennett) and their son Arvin (Tom Holland), a boy about to get a horrible lesson in life's darkness. Then there's Sandy (Riley Keough) and Carl Henderson (Jason Clarke), a murderous couple roaming the state's highways picking up unfortunate hitchhikers. Finally there's Reverend Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson), a scumbag preacher who crosses paths with Arvin's stepsister Lenora (Eliza Scanlon). Two chance encounters in a diner set off a series of events that ensure everything converges over the next 18 years.

God this was a harsh film and not one I can say I was a fan of. It's a film that takes a longwinded and roundabout way to say not much at all. It feels disjointed, in places pointless, in others so dark all you'll be able to do is choke out a startled laugh. It's an ensemble piece about interconnecting lives but it feels so skewed towards one side that one particular pair are barely sketched out caricatures and as such their role in the climax of the film turns it all into a damp fizzle instead of a bang. 

You'll be watching this struggling to find any bit of meaning in it at all, some throughline, some connective tissue to tie it all together and you'll come up short. There's allusions to hangovers from the horrors of World War 2 and the terror of whats ahead in Vietnam but other than that we get no real insight, Arvin aside, into what makes these people tick. The intrusive, overbearingly folksy narration strives to give some significance to it all there's just something missing. The special thing that makes a piece like this click. Some stories just seem to work better on paper than onscreen and this feels like one of them. There's too much going on here. A miniseries might have done it more justice.

Where it does succeed though is it's performances. Every single one strikes the right note, even the underwritten ones like Jason Clark's Carl and Riley Keough's Sandy, one, a man so vile you'll start itching the moment he appears and the other a willing pawn in his sickness. Eliza Scanlen stands out as Lenora, an image of innocence in a pit of snakes while Robert Pattinson does horribly effective work as another heartland predator, this time worming his way into lives under the pretence of doing god's work. But the film's best turns come from Skarsgård and Holland, as a father and son struggling to deal with the horror they carry inside, processing it the best way they can by projecting it at the evil men who deserve to be punished. They'll be what you remember when the rest fades away. Except the spider bit. I'll be taking that one with me for a good while yet. Shudder.

The Devil All The Time is streaming from today on Netflix. It's dark and unsettling but it's clumsy and messy too.