CITY OF MEXICO (Process). One of the complaints among the comments about The Devil All The Time (The Devil All The Time; EU, 2020) is the lack of soul of the characters, a reflection that surprises because that is precisely the theme of this film by Antonio Campos, the loss and soul searching of that procession of entities that roam the counties of Ohio and Virginia, in the deep south of the United States, guided by a religious faith capable of justifying the worst horrors, as the director explains.
It is another of the very ambitious Netflix productions released this year, a project supported by Jake Gyllenhaal, which brought together several of the best actors of the moment, such as Tom Holland or Robert Pattison, who take the opportunity to breathe outside the mainstream and show that they know how to act, not just play spidermen, vampires or bats.
Adaptation, very close to the original text, of the novel of the same name by Donald Ray Pollock, who also acts as voice-over narrator, The Devil at All Hours maintains, from beginning to end, the tone of the southern Ohio Gothic call, a subgenre that goes beyond the psychological thriller; the merit of the Brazilian New Yorker Antonio Campos was to harmonize the speech of each character within a kind of pear with the cadence of regional speech; a symphony charged with sadness, irony and despair. Each actor shines with their local accent work, regardless of their British or Australian origin.
Although the title sounds like a hyperbolic metaphor, Pollock, a truck driver for years in those regions, does not mean to exaggerate; a diabolical force infiltrates and permeates the relations of the inhabitants, it affects, above all, the families, and contaminates the faith itself; religious symbols are perverted, the pastor’s sermon distils poison, his acts infect whoever approaches. Of course, the Southern Gothic, straddling naturalism and hoodoo magic (voodoo inheritance from African slaves), with its eccentric types, is not attractive to many readers, can seem artificial in the movies and exasperate the public because The actions and reactions of the characters do not have much psychological congruence, as they depend on dark, inexplicable forces.
It is that this deep south, with echoes of Faulkner and Carson McCullers, has been limited in two terrible wars, World War II and Vietnam. Arvin’s father (Hollander), Willard (Bill Skarsgard) returned from Guadalcanal where he saw a crucified companion, hence the vision to be that of a dog on the cross to which he forces his son to pray to him. Later, Arvin looks for a way out of that labyrinth of symbols and perversion, like that of the Pastor (Pattison) who seduces his sister with a diabolical preach that amalgamates the voice of the gospel with the crudest lustful maa.
The demons are on the loose, raping and murdering left and right; humor, which is not lacking, depends on the grotesque way of operating.
–
