Not so for The Devil All the Time, which encases its grotesquerie in a certain self-seriousness.

This distinguishes the film from many recent cinematic entries of a similar vein others, like Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy (2012) and William Friedkin’s grease-smeared Killer Joe (2011) lean into a more knowingly absurd, borderline-camp tone. Curiously, though, the tone of Campos’s film is sedate, even while the content is incredibly lurid. The Devil All the Time is an uncompromising, nasty ensemble piece.

Tom Holland, too, stands out, finding within his familiar boyish innocence the ability to emit a blank-eyed propensity for vengeance. It features strong performances from a bevy of actors, most memorably Robert Pattinson as a paedophilic evangelical priest. Getting out of this film alive is what you might call a challenge. Knockemstiff and the surrounding environs are peopled by delusional religious fanatics, twisted preachers, corrupt lawmen, and truckstop sex killers. Death haunts the steps of its characters, young and old, as the narrative moves through Arvin’s story and into overlapping stories of the denizens of the town. His young son Arvin (Tom Holland) is the progeny of an unhappy lineage, orphaned young, and he is thrown into his grandmother’s house with another young waif, Leonora (Shannon Murphy) whose upbringing is hardly any better. Murder and violence are as common in this town as chicken liver. The story begins with the return from the South Pacific of a young veteran, played by a gaunt Bill Skarsgård, whose hardship turns him toward religious mania. – The ‘lost’ teen classic finally getting recognition – Nomadland review: a film overflowing with humanity Warning: This article contains strong language that might cause offence. This is the grimy world of The Devil All the Time, the fourth feature film from director Antonio Campos, whose hard-as-nails, gun-toting characters come originally from the provocative Southern Gothic novel by Donald Ray Pollock. The plain-talking, cornfed folks of Knockemstiff, Ohio circa 1957 are prone to occasional bouts of backwoods philosophising, but are unable to break the cycles of violence and poverty that surround them. “Some people were born just so they could be buried,” says a small-town sheriff talking to a young boy in his patrol car.

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock