As a child, Arvin Russell watched his father pray.
The elder Russell, Willard, built a makeshift chapel in the woods out back—nothing more, really, than a cross standing before a fallen tree. But every morning, and every night, Willard would walk back to that cross, that fallen tree, and pray.
“It seemed to his son that his father fought the devil all the time,” the Narrator tells us.
The devil sure needs fighting.
When Willard was a soldier in World War II, he came across a fellow American: Sergeant Miller Jones, according to his dog tags. He had been flayed and crucified, a combat knife stabbed through his feet.
He was still alive.
Sgt. Jones lived just another few seconds, thanks to Willard, but the images were harder to kill. Every time he saw a cross, he remembered the man. And perhaps that shaped—or twisted—Willard’s piety.
When Willard’s beloved wife, Charlotte, lay dying from cancer, Willard prayed like never before. He dragged 9-year-old Arvin to the woods and forced him to pray, too. They kneeled before that homemade cross and screamed those prayers up to the heavens in a show of desperate piety. And if Arvin wasn’t praying fiercely enough or seemed to be distracted, Willard would hit him.
But Willard sensed more was needed. So he took Arvin’s dog and killed it. And then he nailed the dog to the cross.
Willard didn’t teach his son much, perhaps. He didn’t have the time. When Charlotte died despite their fervent prayers, Willard killed himself. Arvin found his father’s body, slumped over the fallen tree and under the crucified dog. But Willard did drive home one important point: That the world is filled with lots of terrible people, and he best remember that.
As Arvin grew, he remembered. And time and again, his father’s warnings proved just right.
In Willard’s and Arvin’s sprawling story—one that stretches across two decades—the devil indeed seems to be everywhere, weaving his black thread through the towns of Knockemstiff, Ohio; and Coal Creek, West Virginia. He’s present on a crooked sheriff in the pay of a local crime lord. In a pastor who seduces young girls. In a serial killer and his wife who lure young strangers to annihilation.
Eight years after Willard’s death, Arvin doesn’t pray anymore. Never felt like it did much good. Everywhere Arvin looks, seems like the devil’s winning.
[Note: Spoilers are contained in the following sections.]
Devil All the Time is an all-too-fitting title for what we see in this movie. Evil thrives in the film’s small-town climate. But it’s not yet laid a claim on everyone.
Take Emma, Arvin’s grandmother who, after Willard’s death, takes the boy home to live with her, She’s as kind and loving a woman as you’d ever want to meet. And even though she’s at an age where you’d think she could rest for a bit, she takes on the burdens of raising two more children she thought she’d never have to raise.
The second child is a girl named Lenora, whose mother was murdered and whose father is long gone. (Most folks believe her dad killed her mother, and it’s true.) Despite the tragedy in her own past—or perhaps because of it—Lenora grows into a conscientious and pious high schooler who says she’s even forgiven her father, whatever he might’ve done. She spends many afternoons sitting by her mother’s grave, sometimes reading the Bible out loud, imagining that her mom is listening.
And Arvin, he loves both Grandma Emma and Lenora fiercely. The movie shows us just how fierce that love can be … though sometimes in questionable ways.
Faith—often a twisted understanding of faith—lies at the core of many characters’ motivations. Sometimes it pushes folks in a positive direction. But other times … well, we’ll see.
On the positive side of the ledger, let’s start again with Grandma Emma. She’s quite devoted to God. She’s recognized as the best cook in the region, but she insists that she couldn’t fry an egg before she found God. “He was the One who guided her hand and made everything turn out good,” the Narrator tells us.
Lenora’s innocent faith is also nice. Even though her piety makes her the target of school bullies, they don’t stop her from praying and reading the Bible. When it looks as if she might miss church, she frets and says it’d be the first time in her life. She tries to encourage Arvin to have a little faith, too. When Arvin repeats his father’s lesson of how many terrible people there are in the world, she says, “Well, maybe you should try praying for them. Would that hurt none?”
“You’re already praying for all of us,” Arvin snaps. “Not doing you much good.”
Their church is taken over by the young Rev. Preston Teagardin, a man who knows his Bible but uses and twists it for his own ends. At a potluck, he uses an impromptu sermon to shame Grandma Emma for bringing chicken livers (which he “sacrificially” takes all of and eats; Arvin suspects that Teagardin selfishly took the best-tasting dish for himself). And he habitually seduces young girls and women, using faith as a prime tool in that seduction. (With one victim, he suggests that she should take off her clothes as an offering to God—to show “the Lord” every bit of herself to get closer to Him.) And then, when he fears that his lewd trysts might be discovered, he begins speaking on the “delusions” found in the Bible—trying to silence or discredit his theoretical accusers before they even come forward.
A pair of traveling preachers speaks and sings at the church, too. One is wheelchair-bound—the product, it’s whispered, of the guy testing his faith by drinking strychnine or antifreeze. His brother, Roy, preaches about the terrible fears unbelievers will find in hell, then tells the congregation he’s always feared spiders. He then takes a jar of spiders and dumps them on his head as a way of proving God’s saving grace.
We learn later that Roy’s spider-stunt went awry one day: One of the spiders bit him and his head swelled up “as big as a pumpkin.” He figured the Lord was trying to tell him something and locked himself in a closet for weeks. “Maybe the Lord wants you to come out into the light,” his worried wife tells Roy. “I mean, how can you be close to God stuck in there? The Lord don’t like dark places.”
But Roy soon gets what he thinks is a message from God: to kill his wife, believing that the Lord will give him the power to resurrect her. (Roy’s faith, as you might expect, goes unrewarded.)
We’re told that Carl, a serial killer, considers murder a spiritual experience. “Only in the presence of death could he feel the presence of something like God,” the Narrator tells us. Meanwhile, his wife and accomplice, Sandy, worries about the spiritual status of their victims. “You’ve been baptized, right?” she asks one as they drive him to a secluded spot.
We’ve already talked about Willard’s twisted piety. Clearly, religion plays a huge role here, and we’ve not covered it all. We see religious pictures and crosses. We hear lots of Gospel music. And the Narrator and others speculate whether many of the movie’s odd coincidences were, in fact, mere chance or acts of God.
Married couple Sandy and Carl travel the countryside, looking for “models” to pick up. Sandy and the model have sex (which Carl photographs), after which Carl kills the model and takes more pictures. We see several pictures—some black and white, some negatives—of Sandy and her models in various states of undress and posing for the camera, sometimes in compromising positions. (In several we see Sandy’s breasts; in others we see naked men, including one where the man’s genitals are only partly obscured by the man’s hand.) We also see photos of Sandy cheerfully and sultrily posing with the resulting corpses. In one flashback to a killing, a naked man struggles with Carl: We would see critical body parts had they not been, apparently, shot off.
Preston Teagardin also shows up on screen with his own paramours—mostly high school girls, it would seem. Two encounters involve oral sex, one of which is suggested, while the other is more graphic. Teagardin slowly pulls a shirt up from yet another conquest: We see the girl only from the back and see her bra straps. Teagardin gets one of these girls pregnant. And when the girl tells him about the unwanted pregnancy, Teagardin denies any responsibility and suggests the girl’s delusional. (“How could I be the daddy when all we done is spend time with the Lord?” he says, adding that she should find “some way to get rid of it”.) He also has a profoundly graphic and uncomfortable conversation about sex with a parishioner in the guise of a sort of confession.
Another sexual act (complete with some graphic verbal description of it) takes place between a police officer and a woman in his police car. A high-school guy takes a girl into a school bus in order to have sex. (He unbuckles his belt and is excited to “get off her bloomers.”) A couple of poachers make really lewd comments about Willard’s wife as Willard and 9-year-old Arvin pray. (Willard keeps his son from attacking, saying that their prayer time is the Lord’s time.) School bullies tell Lorena that they’d need to put a bag over her head to have sex with her (and then they put a bag over her head). They also suggest that Lorena and Arvin—who aren’t related by blood but living as brother and sister—are having sex. (They aren’t.)
A girl’s virginity is wryly called “her holy gift” by Teagardin in a sermon. We hear (and see the entrance to) a place of ill-repute. Someone takes a picture of a pretty waitress. People fall in love. We hear people talk about various forms of sex and states of sexual arousal.
We’ve touched on some of the movie’s violence in the sections above: the crucified man, the crucified dog, the sexualized murders, etc. I’ll not repeat those here, but we’ve still got plenty to cover.
A woman is stabbed in the throat with a screwdriver and bleeds out in front of the murderer’s (and our) eyes. We learn the body was found seven years later, buried in the woods. A man is shot several times in a church, dying in his own blood. Several other people are shot and killed; sometimes, the blood splashes across walls and curtains and windows. Sometimes it just seeps out of the wound, turning white clothing red. Someone contemplates suicide, tying a rope around her neck. She changes her mind, but accidentally kicks the bucket out from under her feet and strangles to death anyway. Willard kills himself with a knife.
Willard believes in getting even with folks—but only on his own terms. After he hears the poachers making lewd comments about his wife, he finds an opportunity to beat them horrifically. He punches one in the face until his knuckles bleed profusely, then pushes the man’s face into the mud until onlookers are worried that Willard will kill him. He goes over to another man (who’s trying to hide in a car), smashes a window with a rifle butt, then clubs the man several times with that butt.
We’re told that Arvin would later “think on this day as the best one he ever spent with his father,” and he took those violent lessons to heart. He doles out his own share of beatings—brutalizing a trio of bullies (including slamming a car hood down on one) until his own knuckles bleed. He forces bags over their own heads (just as they did with his sister) and threatens to kill them if they ever bully Lorena again.
A woman is found lying on the floor after collapsing due to the cancer in her. Arvin comes home with a black eye from school. (Willard exhorts Arvin to finish his fights and make sure they regret ever hitting him.) He fights as a teen, too: Lorena spots him with blood coming out of his nose, and we witness him savagely attacked by a trio of instigators—punching him in the face and kicking him in the belly.
Corpses are seen, sometimes left to rot and with flies buzzing all around. We see mangled bodies in photos (often negatives, which does help to blunt the impact a bit). We hear that one of Sandy and Carl’s victims was chopped up and stuffed in a suitcase. Sandy complains that she doesn’t like it when their victims’ cry. Carl insists that “tears make for a good photograph.”
About 35 f-words and nearly 30 s-words. We hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n” and “h—” as well. God’s name is misused about 13 times, most of those with the word “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused five times.
A sheriff drinks quite a bit, often on the job. We’re told the coroner is “a drunk,” too. Sandy and Carl encourage their victims to drink alcohol (thus lowering both their inhibitions and their ability to fight back). Charlotte is dying from cancer, but the doctor says the morphine will make her more comfortable.
Yes, there’s more!
Someone vomits. Someone else urinates by a lake. (His back is turned to the camera.)
Lee Bodecker, the sheriff of Knockemstiff, is as dirty as lawmen come. He meets frequently with the local crime boss to receive payouts and looks the other way regarding the man’s dirty dealings. He’s the older brother to Sandy, the serial-killer wife, too. At first he thinks she’s merely promiscuous and tells her to chill out while he’s running for re-election. But when Bodecker realizes what else Sandy’s done, he tries to cover it up in any way possible—again, to protect his re-election.
The Devil All the Time is based on a 2011 book of the same name by Donald Ray Pollock. And from what I gather, Netflix might’ve ratcheted back the content a bit.
But, as you can surely tell by now, this two-and-a-half-hour movie still has plenty of it for those who, like Carl and Sandy, have a hankering for sex and blood.
The movie has plenty of spirituality, too. Indeed, it seems like it’s one of the movie’s prime movers. And it asks some provocative questions, to be sure. It practically insists we take stock of the story and think about just what divine or demonic hands might be at work there.
At the beginning of the story, the Narrator asks us to ponder just that question—asking why so many people from two small towns would be so intricately interlinked. “Some would claim it was just dumb luck, while others might swear it was God’s intention.” The truth, the Narrator suggests might be a bit of both.
But how we answer leads to other, even more uncomfortable questions, and frankly, this review is long enough as it is.
The Devil All the Time is not completely devoid of merit, both aesthetically and spiritually. But it’s terribly twisted and polluted by the movie’s unrelenting and gratuitous content.
Some movies entertain. Some movies educate. But this movie punishes the viewer. It serves up humanity’s worst inclinations and then forces you to watch them all—pounding them into your head with the force of a rifle butt.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
