Director Antonio Campos has adapted Donald Ray Pollock's 2011 Southern Gothic noir, The Devil All The Time, with plenty of style, grim pity for the unavoidable tragedies of its multi-story characters and an increasingly brutal and grotesque body count.
Set in the backwaters of West Virginia and the real-life Ohio town of Knockemstiff, the film begins in the post-World War 2 era before taking us on a roller-coaster ride of misery that skips back and forth in time and between a set of memorably sketched, loosely connected characters spanning the decades leading up to the Vietnam War.
The plot is twisted and convoluted and suitably full of evil, misguided and pitiful poor white crazies doomed by fate to eternally replicate the sins of their fathers.
It is narrated by Pollock himself, with a sly, blackly humorous tone that's jarringly at odds with the viciousness of the fates of the characters but which sets the uncomfortable scene for what follows in the film's two-hour-plus nightmarish journey.
Reduced to its bare bones, the plot goes something like this: a shattered World War 2 veteran named Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård) is returning home to his parents in Coal Creek, West Virginia. He's haunted by seeing a fellow soldier crucified by the Japanese during the war, a nightmare briefly interrupted when he falls for a young diner waitress named Charlotte Russell (Haley Bennett). He swears to his parents that he intends to make the woman his wife.
Bill is so entranced by Charlotte, he hardly notices her co-worker, Sandy (Riley Keogh) who catches the eye of smiling psychopathic Carl Henderson (Jason Clarke). Willard's mother is sceptical of her son's infatuation and tries to push him in the direction of a mousey church lass, Helen Hatton (Mia Wasikowska), but she only has eyes for the poisonous spider-wrangling itinerant preacher Roy Laferty (Harry Melling).
The incidental connections between these three couples drive the rest of the story across the decades and into some nasty situations.
Willard and Charlotte marry and have a son — Arvin (Tom Holland), who becomes the main character in what follows — navigating a violent and godless vision of the American backwaters that sees him beset by a thirst for revenge that he never quite understands. It brings him and his beloved step-sister Lenora (Eliza Scanlen) into the orbit of snake oil preacher the Rev Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson) and ultimately towards a reckoning with Sandy's small-town corrupt sheriff brother, Lee Boedecker (Sebastian Stan).
That's a lot to fit into any film — and it's only the half of it — but Campos, together with brother and co-writer Paul, manage to create a world that echoes the classic Southern Gothic uneasiness of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor and they add a heavy dose of gory fatalism and pessimistic humour that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers.
Things don't always hold together and the plot gets messy and dirty as hell, but thanks to the excellent cinematography of Lol Crawley, some sterling choices by veteran music supervisor Randall Poster, and a string of top-notch performances from its cast, everything somehow works in the end. Hollard and Pattison excel at shedding their pretty-boy images for some proper acting that gives life to the tortured souls of their characters.
If there's an overarching theme in the midst of all the nastiness, it's that faith is fickle and peppered with hypocritical chancers who'll manipulate their flocks in pursuit of their own self-interest. This happens in places where having faith is supposed to be the only thing that can save you — but it's most likely to fail you no matter how hard you try to use it to keep the devils within at bay.
• 'The Devil All The Time' is available on Netflix.
