The Devil All the Time

Antonio Campos moves between Knockemstiff in Ohio and a West Virginia town, from the end of the Second World War into the sixties. Knockemstiff is real: Donald Ray Pollock, who wrote the novel, grew up there, worked at the Mead paper mill as a labourer and truck driver until fifty, and published his first book at 54. The voice-over is Pollock’s own. Campos says they always had his voice in mind and nobody else could do it. The film then reads like a book read aloud; the voice announces what the characters cannot know, which holds some viewers outside the scene. Robert Pattinson was the only cast member to let nobody hear preacher Teagardin’s voice in preparation. Campos says he first heard the accent once shooting started, with Pattinson turning up already in character; the references were Elvis Presley interviews and sermon recordings online. Neither state appears: the whole shoot ran from 19 February to 15 April 2019 in Alabama, in Anniston, Pell City, Birmingham and Montevallo. A good fit if you can sit with an opening stretch given to Bill Skarsgård as the father rather than Tom Holland, and two generations told one after the other. Not for you if a narrator constantly reporting the action feels redundant, or if religion, abuse and suicide in sequence is too much.