Review of The Devil All the Time (2020) by Theredsky — 19 Sep 2020

To be completely honest, I didn’t expect to like this movie as much as I did. Obviously I had issues but it doesn’t take too much away from what the film did well. An issue I had with the film is the pacing.

Certain plot points in the movie feel rushed as if it was a check in the box and not something the Director cared a lot about it. It was a lot worse in the first 45 minutes because everything happens so fast that it’s hard to care about some of these characters.

Once Tom Holland shows up though, the film gets drastically better. Tom Holland does an excellent job here and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed his performance. This is easily his best performance to date.

This is the same for Bill Skarsgård. I love him as Pennywise in IT but I found his performance here to be much more engaging. Robert Pattinson is excellent as always and he did a really good southern accent here.

This is definitely a Top 5 performance from him but not my personal favorite. Everyone else here did a good job but it was harder to care about their characters than Holland, Skarsgård, and Pattinson.

Some people might be put off by the narration but I didn’t mind it because it was narrated by the author of the book that this film is based on. It gave the film a book like feeling which worked for me.

The directing by Antonio Campos is pretty great. He definitely has a great visual style and voice here and he is great at showing these themes of religious extremism and trauma. The cinematography and score also really added to the experience here too.

Go check this out on Netflix if you want but beware of it’s very dark themes and violence.