In this ambitious endeavour they are joined by a broad international cast, with Europeans, Americans and Australasians alike taking variable runs at very specific regional accents (the word “deluuuusions!” becomes a 15-syllable warble), creating an ensemble in which there really is no such thing as an incidental role. These disparate threads must eventually be tied together, and fraternal co-writers Paulo and Antonio Campos do a terrific job of weaving in and out of each story, observing this darkly immersive world through kaleidoscopic eyes. “That’s from the Bible, ain’t it honey?” asks Sandy (Riley Keough) sweetly before one such escapade, to which her husband, Carl (an impressively slimy, sweaty Jason Clarke), pointedly replies “ Everything is from the Bible…” Meanwhile, hillbilly preachers pour spiders on their faces and attempt to resurrect recently murdered women, while a pair of serial killing shutterbugs roam the land in search of male “models”, luring their prey with liquor and church talk. “It seemed that his father had fought the devil all the time,” writes Pollock, whose richly sonorous voice provides the on-screen narration for Antonio Campos’s respectful adaptation.įacing the loss of his beloved wife, Willard (Bill Skarsgård, who scared everyone to death as a killer clown in It) forces his son to join him in crying out to God – a God who seems oddly unmoved by such desperate devotions as nailing a dead dog to a makeshift cross. Set between the aftermath of the second world war and the gathering storm of Vietnam, it’s a labyrinthine tale of hardscrabble lives and monstrous deaths in woodsy environs, littered with fanatical fornicating preachers, misguided, faith-fuelled sacrifices and tortuous family legacies, passed unforgivingly from one generation to another.įlipping back and forth in time as the narrative slips between Coal Creek, West Virginia, and Knockemstiff, Ohio (think Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction meets Dominic Murphy’s White Lightnin’), the interlacing storylines spiral around Arvin Russell (played as a young man by Tom Holland), whose father returned from the war haunted by visions of a grotesque battleground crucifixion. The same could be said of The Devil All the Time, a similarly genre-bending tale of twisted faith and postwar trauma, adapted from Donald Ray Pollock’s 2011 novel, which drew comparisons with Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. “T here’s a lot of religion going around with this thing,” says Mickey Rourke’s shell-shocked gumshoe in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, a devilish mix of neo-noir intrigue and gothic horror based on William Hjortsberg’s page-turning novel.

The devil of all time book