Netflix is on a two week hot streak, I will say it over and over again, it would be better to see these movies in the theaters, but at least if I cannot go, Netflix has released two gems recently, which helps relieve some of the pain. This week they released Antonio Campos’s The Devil All the Time, a mystery drama. Although slow at times, all the details seemed important to an equation that had an answer at the end unlike I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Netflix’s release last week. The movie felt like doing a puzzle, but without knowing what the picture would look like at the end. A piece was placed here and then there, and slowly it all came together. It was a little over two hours, which makes it feel long, but the payoff of putting it together was worth it.
The movie starts with a forty-five-minute intro to some of the main players in the story and their parents. The timeline jumps around toward the beginning, but it works well and was easy enough to follow. The story takes place in a couple of rural towns in Ohio, but it was filmed in Northern Alabama. It features many mountain-like landscapes, and it had a fall feel to it as well. The main story line was that there was corruption in these small towns that spread from people like the preacher to the sheriff. All people that were supposed to be the most moral and upstanding citizens taking advantage of their power to make the communities they live in much worst. The hero of the story, Arvin Russell starts out as a young boy, but he learned from his dad what frontier type justice was, and that was how he went about trying to fix his community, some times more inadvertently than others, but he had a positive influence.
The main theme of the movie was that there are people in power that will inevitably take advantage of said power. It goes back to the saying of absolute power corrupts absolutely. When it came to the new preacher in town, he took advantage of Arvin’s sister’s faith. The preacher, Robert Pattinson, would take her into the woods, and he used her faith to take advantage of her sexually by saying that God created them to be in their most pure forms. This eventually led to her becoming pregnant, but the preacher rejected the fact that he could have been the father and made her feel incredibly ashamed. This led to her seriously considering suicide. Also she was not the only victim, there was at least one other after her, and when Arvin came to confront him and “confess” some sins, the preacher seemed overly interested in the details of the sexual details of them. It was a powerful scene when the preacher was preaching about disillusionment while the sister was preparing to hang herself, but the one that was clearly disillusioned was the preacher. The other person who was taking advantage of his power was the Sheriff of one of the towns. He had multiple under the table deals, and all he seemed to care about was getting reelected and his public image. His sister was a part of a murdering tandem, and he used his power to try and brush it under the rug. He also murdered two of his criminal allies that he had under the table deals with, and he knew he could get away with it because he was the sheriff. I feel like this had some timely take aways embedded within the theme. One of them being that both people were white men taking advantage of their power. This has been a problem discussed repeatedly recently. Also with the impending election, obviously there have been many arguments about the president taking advantage of his power, but there is also the whole aspect of most politicians being old white men with little diversity, and the idea that politicians are less than honest in the deals that they make, and what they might be willing to do to get reelected.
Another theme that seemed to reoccur towards the first half of the movie was having misplaced faith, it might have been a larger critique on Christianity specifically, but I am not sure. This misplacement of faith started with Arvin’s dad, who had a troubled past in WWII, where he found a superior officer hung on a cross, so every time he went to church that was all he could think about, then since he read in the Bible that God was willing to help those who made sacrifices to him, when his wife got cancer, he sacrificed Arvin’s dog, but it did not help. This was also followed with a similar story of a different pastor, that was Arvin’s stepsister’s Dad who was also a preacher. He seemed to boast in his faith and God’s willingness to protect him, which seemed to go against the story of the Devil tempting Jesus while Jesus was in the wilderness. Jesus said he did not need to prove anything to devil about how much God would protect him, whereas this preacher felt like he had to show it off. Then this pastor hid in his closet for a couple of weeks waiting for God to speak to him, and when he thought God spoke to him, he went into the woods with his wife and stabbed her in the neck because he thought God was going to resurrect her. Finally they showed misguided faith with Arvin’s sister falling for the preachers sexual tricks. So the movie seemed to point out that people need to be careful in what they put their faith in, and maybe they should put it more into themselves than people in power hoping that those in power will change things because odds are they will not.
There was an interesting pairing of actors in this movie as well, and the some of the names were big. There was Tom Holland, who had the most screen time, who is the newest spiderman. There was Robert Pattinson that played the disillusioned pastor that took advantage of Tom Holland’s sister, and he is going to be the newest Batman, and he has other well-known roles. Finally there was Bill Skarsgard, who might be less known by his name, but he has been in some blockbusters as well. He was the clown in Stephen King’s It Part One and Two. He was also in Castlerock on Hulu. He does an excellent job of playing some one that has a creepy feel to them, that there is something more sinister or painful lurking beneath the surface of the character. I found the pairing of Holland and Pattinson interesting though, mashing up a Marvel actor and D.C actor. It reminded me of The Prestige, which paired Christian Bale, who was Batman, and Hugh Jackman, who was wolverine. In both cases it paired two actors that would never collide in the superhero universe, but collide in a vastly different acting world, and both movies turned out well. To draw out the role of the actors slightly more, the new Batman movie with Pattinson is supposed to be more of a detective crime noir Batman, but in this movie, it was Holland that got to play this role. Once his sister died, he decided he was going to investigate the preacher more sense something seemed off, and he also ended up catching another murderer and took care of the corrupt sheriff. Whereas in the Spiderman movies, Holland seems like more of a happy fun character, so it was a big change up for him to be the main player in a darker role. Pattinson played the messed-up preacher role well, there was something special to the facial expressions he has that makes the performance so much better. I could just see the disillusionment on his face that he felt like he was guiltless and could do no wrong.
Another interesting aspect to this movie was the narration that occurred from time to time. It provided good exposition throughout the movie, but there were three main times that it helped the most. The first time was at the beginning of the movie, the narrator helped set up much of the story and what was to come. He also gave good background knowledge on the characters. The next time that the narration played a big role was when Arvin’s sister was about to take her own life, but then the narrator said that she decided that her Grand Mother would not be ashamed of her, and that she could give the baby a good life. If the narration had not been there when viewing the movie, it could have easily gotten past the viewer that she was about to step down, when she slipped and accidently hung herself, and if that moment of change was missed, it would have looked like she had chosen to go through with it. Then it came in handy again with the murderous couple toward the end of the movie. The narrator mentioned that the wife had grown ever tired of the killing life, and that she was thinking of killing her husband and running away with Arvin in the back seat, but then Arvin beat her to the punch, and she tried to kill Arvin after that, but then the narrator explained that her gun only had blanks because her husband no longer trusted her. Using narration can be a risky aspect to add to a movie, there have been times when it has been unnecessary and taken away from the movie, but this was not one of those movies, it definitely added something here and gave it a western feel.
Finally there was one more aspect of the movie that seemed unique, and that was with the murderous couple. When the coupled would take their victims into the secluded woods, the husband would take pictures of the guy they were killing. When the sheriff finds the dark room where the negatives of the pictures were being developed after his sister died, they show the collection of the negative photos of the men that had been killed. There was something extra added in the chilling/unsettling factor when viewing the pictures in the negative form. It almost seemed like the emotion of the pain and suffering of the victims was amplified from viewing it this way. So even though it was only a small part of the movie, it felt very impactful. Also this whole story line of a guy luring people out into the remote wilderness to model for him reminded me of a podcast I had listened to about a killer that committed similar acts. There was a man that lived in California named William Bradford, and he would lure young women out into the desert because he said that they had modeling potential, but then he would kill them. So although this movie might have been based on a fictional book, there are actual people out in the world willing to commit these heinous acts.
I knew little about this movie going into it, except for that it had Holland and Pattinson in it, so I had the expectations that it would be a good movie, and it was. It was a little long, and it had its slow parts, but in the end, the whole story came together very well. Also the acting performances by all involved did not disappoint either. The story although taking place in the 1950s still has lessons that are pertinent to the time we are living in still. I gave the movie an 83. This puts it at the third best film coming out in 2020. It had a more coherent story than I Am Thinking of Ending Things, but it did not keep me as glued to the screen. It lulled at points, and it did not make me think and feel as much. Still a good movie and well worth the watch! If you watched it, please let me know what you thought in the Facebook comments!
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