Writer/director Antonio Campos (Afterschool) turns The Devil All the Time into a bleak yet honest tale of characters struggling with life and faith, narrated by original author Donald Ray Pollock. While the interplay of characters is interesting, the story wanders across itself too often to leave the audience feeling anything but relief when it ends.
When Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård) comes back from World War 2, he brings demons with him that haunt him and cause him to waver back and forth in his devotion to God. His son Arvin (Tom Holland) ends up living with Willard's highly devout mother, wavering in his faith, too. As he comes of age, he begins to encounter more and more of the unusual, and even sinister, individuals that populate his region and his life. There is only so much one man can do to right the sins of other people without having his own line between saint and sinner blurred.
Campos effectively explores religion, faith, devotion, and the questioning of these in a pseudo-noir setting. But the story is so dark that it becomes a distraction. This darkness, several short scenes moving to seemingly unrelated ones, and an interrupting narration by a godlike presence that knows more about the characters and their motivations than even they do, numbs the audience before the story really arrives at its point. This pulls away from the overall theme of the intertwining of faith and chance, action and reaction, and just plain dumb luck of both varieties.
Despite the story's difficulties, Campos never loses the pace, although it is a very leisurely one throughout. The stark, plinking soundtrack sets the mood, a constant reminder of just how awful everyone's life is that matches the film exquisitely. Also, each scene is dark or overcast, echoing the lives of most of the people involved.
What Campos misses in framing the story so that it would hold the interest of the viewer he makes up for in his fine direction of the cast. There is never a feeling of plasticity to any of them. This is a combination of quality instruction that ensures each performer is on pace and a finely selected cast who live inside the characters rather than separate from them. The film really only has one lead, Tom Holland, who owns Arvin so well that he completely divorces himself from anything else he has done. But the supporting, international cast delivers solid performances, right down to perfect regional accents, too. Of particular note are Harry Potter veterans Robert Pattinson and Harry Melling as preachers of two distinctly different stripes.
Despite an intriguing concept, music and scenery that set the mood well, and exceptional acting, the film is too dismal for any but the most devoted audiences. At 2 hours 18 minutes, they gave it all the time needed to get where it was going, but it spent too much time meandering on depressing backroads to reach its intended destination in time for anyone to care.