If what the world needs right now is an intensely brutal, violent and disturbing film, then director Antonio Campos just hit the nail on the head. It is genuinely difficult to even begin processing the devastating plotlines of “The Devil All the Time,” a new Netflix film that premiered Sept. 16. Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland and Bill Skarsgard star in this turbulent tale of tragedy, and they and their co-stars all deliver noteworthy performances. It is a fine film in many ways, but the whitewashed depiction of intergenerational trauma is both inaccurate and severely tonedeaf.
Campos’ film is oriented around teenager Arvin Russell (Holland). He lives in Coal Creek, West Virginia with his grandmother, uncle and adopted sister Lenora. He and Lenora share not only a house and a strong bond but also the trauma of being orphaned because of especially tragic deaths.
Violence is the first throughline in this movie. Religion is the second. Arvin’s late father, Willard Russel (Skarsgard), constructed a “prayer log” where he prayed regularly and vehemently, encouraging Arvin to do the same. The movie comes back to the location of this prayer log multiple times as the site of several deaths. In the characters’ lives, religion is not a saving grace, but instead a catalyst for the unholy.
Another instance of this is Lenora’s life. She is devout and visits her mother’s grave daily after school. While this sacred routine seems to have a stabilizing effect on her, it subtly becomes cataclysmic. The plotline of religion serves as a harrowing reminder of how something meant to bring people together can instead tear them apart.
There is a parallel storyline about a murderous couple in Ohio, which also aligns with the violence theme. The couple ends up picking up Arvin from the side of the road and briefly giving him a ride, but then the three part ways. While the storylines are supposed to be intertwined, the connections among characters are not quite significant enough, and there is little to no meaning attached to them.
At best, the movie is an interesting story, albeit a dark and gruesome one. It would not be surprising for “The Devil All the Time” to be nominated for an Oscar or two. It is well shot and well acted, and, if you can stomach the violence, you can get lost in the suspense.
However, there is an overarching disjointedness to the movie. It begins in 1957. This is just two years after both the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and the protest of Rosa Parks in Alabama. These events were both central to the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, and were followed by a succession of other seminal developments in the years to come — the Little Rock Nine in 1957, the Greensboro Sit-In in 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the March on Washington in 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to name a few. After mentioning none of these events, the movie cuts to the summer of 1965. This would be only months after the assassination of Malcolm X.
It is shocking that, here in 2020, a movie was made about life in the South in the 1950s and 1960s that does not mention or portray a single Black person. The portrayal of intergenerational trauma is told with White men at the center. This is not necessarily invalid, but it does beg the question: Is this really a story that needs to be told right now?