mogwai-movie-reviews:

Well-made in almost every department, The Devil All The time somehow remains just a little meandering, distracted and dull the whole way through, which must be hard to accomplish with such dramatic source material. There didn’t seem to be any reason to tell this story, other than Netflix wanted another movie: at no point did I ever connect with, warm to, or become intrigued by any of the characters, or care about what would happen to them. They all just seemed like temporary props I was looking at while waiting for the actual story to begin, which never did.

The wheels really start to come off towards the end with a conversation between Tom Holland and the preacher that feels entirely out of character and thoroughly unbelievable, given the time, the setting and his character’s age. A twist to do with a gun shooting blanks is also far-fetched and unneccessary. An obtrusive voiceover continually attempts to link up and explain what the script and performances can’t be bothered to. The whole thing is lazy and underachieving and half an hour too long.



I’ve been trying to fathom the factors at play in what has gone so wrong in the cinematic age we’re all living through - obviously there’s the increased valuing of political posturing and virtue signaling over story, character and believability, but I’ve been wondering if another is the amount of time people are spending in the world of video games, where they are becoming accustomed to ‘story’ being just a series of busy, exciting moments with no connective tissue. When someone tries to kill you in a first person shooter, it’s not considered at all important why that person is doing it: no energy is given to trying to understand the internal causes of any actions or behaviours, past simple fight-or-flight-level responses - what any of it means. To do so would actually be detrimental to the mission and just slow the game down.



So in that world there is increasingly zero depth or reflection expected, no space to breathe, contemplate, think… but this absence of actual story is what more and more people are becoming accustomed to thinking of as story, to the extent they don’t really realize there’s anything missing anymore. This was also the great flaw in Joker, an otherwise gorgeously made and acted series of moments that never added up to anything that made sense or meant anything. The essential impression with all these films is that they are colourfully painted empty shells: there’s no “there” there.

It’s a trend I’ve been seeing more and more, especially since the lines between film and TV have become so blurred - I first remember noticing it with shows like Boardwalk Empire, which had fantastic production values, acting and period detail, but seemingly no idea about what story to tell: it simply meandered along from one situation to another with no real point for existing other than to be an entertainment product that looked like a movie. Well, now it’s ever more common to see movies that don’t seem like movies, and The Devil All The Time is sadly just another one of those.



★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰