Tom Holland
Arvin Russell
The Devil All the Time
“Everyone ends up in the same damned place.”
2020
2h 18m
Director: Antonio Campos
Overview
In Knockemstiff, Ohio and its neighboring backwoods, sinister characters converge around young Arvin Russell as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
5 min readThe Devil in the Details
I kept waiting for The Devil All the Time to blink. To let in a sliver of light, a breath of air, anything to break the suffocating weight of its own relentlessness. But it never does. That, in the end, might be the point—or the problem.
Antonio Campos’ film is a Southern Gothic nightmare stitched together from the darkest threads of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, with a dash of noir’s fatalism thrown in for good measure. It’s a story about the rot beneath small-town piety, about how violence and faith twist around each other until you can’t tell which is the parasite and which is the host. The film spans decades, hopscotching between Ohio and West Virginia, following a web of characters whose lives collide in ways that feel fated, though never quite earned.
There’s Arvin Russell (Tom Holland), a boy raised on Bible verses and the brutal lessons of survival; his stepfather, Willard (Bill Skarsgård), who prays over a dying wife with a fervor that borders on madness; Carl and Sandy Henderson (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough), a pair of serial killers who pick up hitchhikers with the casual ease of ordering takeout; and, most memorably, Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson), a preacher whose sermons are as slick and hollow as his hair.
The film’s greatest strength is its atmosphere. Shot on 35mm by cinematographer Lol Crawley, The Devil All the Time has a tactile, lived-in quality that makes its world feel uncomfortably real. The dirt roads, the peeling paint of roadside motels, the way the light filters through the trees—it’s all rendered with a painterly precision that recalls Andrew Wyeth’s stark landscapes.
Campos and Crawley don’t just show you this world; they make you feel the humidity clinging to your skin, the grit of dust in your teeth. It’s the kind of filmmaking that rewards lingering, even when what you’re lingering on is unbearable.
And unbearable is the operative word. The film’s tone is unrelenting, a marathon of misery where every character is either a victim, a predator, or both. There’s a scene early on where Willard, desperate to save his wife from cancer, begins sacrificing dogs on a makeshift altar in the woods, their blood splattering his face as he begs God for a miracle.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThe Devil All the Time (2020): Big Names, Short Paper Trail
Looking for a messy set story here? The search scraps don’t have one. No feud. No reshoot saga. No leaked salary fight. What they do confirm is simpler and sturdier: a grim, latestnetflix.com maintains, star-packed American movie with a literary backbone and a director who likes dark corners.
The catalog target is the 2020 American film by Antonio Campos 
. That credit lines up across listings, which also lock the original title as The Devil All the Time and the country as États-Unis / United States . Short version: this is Campos’s movie, not a remake, sequel, or same-name mix-up.
What the listings actually prove
- Director and shape: 2020 American film by Antonio Campos . One listing tags it Drame, Thriller, 138 min . Another page calls it a psychological thriller .
YTYouTube·The Devil All The Time starring Tom Holland & Ro… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIzazUv2gtI- Ensemble: Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Bill Skarsgård, Sebastian Stan, Riley Keough, Haley Bennett, Eliza Scanlen, Mia Wasikowska, and Jason Clarke . The trailer billing zeroes in on Holland and Pattinson as the marquee pair .
- Source material: The story connects to the debut novel by American author Donald Ray Pollock, originally published in 2011 by Doubleday . That book entry places the action in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia from the end of World War II through the 1960s .
- Director profile: Campos is described as an American filmmaker known for introspective independent films and prestige television exploring dark psychological themes, voyeurism, and troubled characters .
- Critical temperature: The Rotten Tomatoes page surfaces review language calling Campos’s film a “saga of interconnected tragedy” and a “satisfying, exhausting reckoning of all-American ambition” . The same page carries a Holland-focused pull quote: “Tom Holland nails these emotional scenes and, every time he cries, I want to cry with him,” credited in the snippet to Eddie Harrison, film-authority.com .
- Crowd score snapshot: One French listing showed 6.6/10 from 8,955 votes . Scores move. Treat that as a moment-in-time reading, not a verdict.
Why we’re not inventing drama
There’s nothing in this evidence about on-set clashes, pay, deleted scenes, or backstage romance. Nothing about episode counts or salaries because this is a feature, and the snippets give no production anecdotes to chew on. I’m not filling that gap with rumor.
If you want the safe takeaway, here it is. Campos took Pollock’s postwar Ohio—West Virginia sprawl and filtered it through his own bleak-psychology lens , with Holland fronting a deep bench . The reviews sampled here respect the ambition while warning about exhaustion . Everything else? Unconfirmed until better sourcing lands.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.