Religion figures prominently in this slice of American Gothic from Antonio Campos but it's the old time religion of the Old Testament rather than the New and it's the Devil who's in the driving seat in "The Devil All the Time". Covering a period of about twenty years and with a multitude of characters, most of whom come to a sticky end, it's a darkly funny piece of Americana set in the backwoods of West Virginia where murder is more common than a prayer before bedtime.
We've been down these backroads before, of course, all the way back to the seventies. Scorsese cut his teeth on material like this as did Malick and Campos shows us you certainly can't keep a good genre down. It meanders a little and jumps back and forth in time maybe more than it should and it's certainly overlong but it's well-acted, (particularly by Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland), and very nicely narrated by Donald Ray Pollock, author of the original novel.
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