The Devil All the Time (2020)

The Devil All the Time arrives with the grim determination of a Sunday sermon delivered by a man who has stopped believing in the congregation. Antonio Campos adapts Donald Ray Pollock's novel with Pollock himself narrating, guiding us through post-war Ohio and West Virginia, where preachers pour spiders over their heads, photographers murder hitchhikers, and a boy named Arvin grows up burying dogs and fathers alike. It is a film drenched in blood, scripture, and Appalachian rot, and it asks nothing of us beyond endurance.

The frame offers none of the familiar furniture of contemporary cultural instruction. The ensemble is uniformly white, a fact the film neither laments nor examines. Women suffer and die, and the camera records this without commentary. The rural poor are not ennobled as a class; the corrupt sheriff worries only about re-election. There is no environmental parable, no body-positive subplot, no neurodivergent hero whose difference is celebrated as a gift. Roy Laferty's madness comes from a spider bite and bad theology, not from a diagnosis. The film watches its sinners the way a coroner watches a body: professionally, without judgment.

Nothing here lectures. That is the strange achievement of the picture, and also its limitation. It offers no thesis, no moral ledger, no invitation to feel superior to the characters on screen. The result is a film that can be harrowing to the point of punishment, as the reviews had it, and also curiously hollow. For our purposes the ledger is clean. Zero across every marker. A rare specimen: a violent American Gothic that wants only to be a violent American Gothic.