Photo Courtesy of Polygon

Warning: Contains spoilers

When the narrator of “The Devil All the Time” opened the film by posing the question, “How and why so many people from these two piddling places on that map could end up connected?” and then immediately answered it with it having “a lot to do with our story,” I expected this explanation to hold true. Unfortunately, I found Antonio Campos’s adaptation of the Donald Ray Pollock novel of the same name to be disappointingly disjointed, with nothing more to offer than an existentialist look at religion and the strings of fate that tie us together. 

Throughout the runtime of two hours and 18 minutes, I found myself grasping at straws trying to figure out what Campos was trying to say. For the majority of the film, I was convinced it was a commentary on the misogyny and toxic masculinity of the church. Each of the particularly religious male characters ends up exercising their masculinity – and committing a great sin in the process – before their inevitable demise. Bill Skarsgård’s character, Willard, beats two men who had made comments about his wife, letting his young son Arvin (Michael Banks Repeta, later played by Tom Holland) watch, and goes so far as to teach him that this is the way to handle his problems. When Reverend Preston Teagardin, played by a peculiar accent wielding Robert Pattinson, later gets Arvin’s impressionable sister Lenora (Eliza Scanlen) pregnant, which ultimately leads to her death, Arvin knows just what to do: kill him. 

Meanwhile, a married pair of serial killers is on the loose. If this sounds irrelevant, that’s because it practically is. The connections between each story (of which there are numerous) in “The Devil All the Time” are frail, if even there at all. However, what we do know is that the husband in this duo, Carl (Jason Clarke), views his murders as “the one true religion. Only in the presence of death could he feel the presence of something like God.” On the other hand, his wife Sandy (Riley Keough) is growing tired of their murderous expeditions, feeling trapped. So, when Arvin, after committing his own murder, ends up as their next potential victim while hitchhiking away from his crime scene, the narrator suggests Sandy might kill Carl and run off with the young man. I was excited: Finally, a woman in this film would be able to take charge of her own destiny. Not a minute later my hopes were dashed, as Arvin finds out about Carl’s plans and kills him in self-defense. Sandy turns her gun on Arvin and he kills her as well. It’s only after her body is lying there dead that the narrator informs us that Carl had filled her gun with blanks – she never stood a chance either way.

This was the nail in the coffin for my expectations of “The Devil All the Time,” since it became clear to me that the film had nothing substantial to say. Each character that interfered with Arvin’s arc after he killed his sister’s abuser could have easily been done away with and the movie would have been saying exactly the same thing: God is gone, the devil is not. At the end of the day, this was the only takeaway of Campos’s nihilistic film. The core family wasn’t even put together until 40 minutes into the film, and Sebastian Stan’s police chief character felt completely irrelevant, as did Lenora’s backstory. All of these pieces just could not make a whole.

While I enjoyed “The Devil All the Time” and found it entertaining for what it was, I was certainly let down by its lack of substance. More so, I was perplexed by the use of time jumps and the large array of characters that made it feel like I was watching three different movies at once. There is certainly a way to thread together different but connected stories into one cohesive film, with one cohesive message, but “The Devil All the Time” just misses the mark with its weak “fate and luck” explanation.