The Devil All The Time

The Place Beyond the Pines is a huge story. It takes place across multiple generations and is composed of several smaller but related stories. Part of what makes it a great movie is that even once you realize everything has a connection, it's still a surprise whenever another connection is revealed.

The Devil All The Time is the only other movie that I've seen that tries to take on storytelling in a similar way. The Devil All The Time is a pretty long movie and at times does feel like it took on too big of a challenge to tell this whole story in a movie instead of a mini-series, but it's a solid movie that's worth watching.

With Donald Ray Pollock as The Narrator you're going to get lines like "Four hundred or so people lived in Knockemstiff in 1957, nearly all of them connected by blood by one godforsaken calamity or another, be it lust, or necessity, or just plain ignorance", "Some people were born just so they could be buried," and "It seemed to his son that his father was fighting the devil all the time."

Tom Holland plays Arvin Eugene Russell, the star of the show. He is Willard (Bill Skarsgård) and Charlotte's (Haley Bennett) son, as well as the grandson of Emma (Kristin Griffith) and the great-nephew Earskell (David Atkinson).

The opening sets the tone for the rest of the movie. World War II. Willard and two other American soldiers are trenching through Japan when they come across a fellow soldier who has been skinned, still alive, and crucified. It isn't shown but it is implied that Willard is the one who put their fellow soldier out of his misery.

When he comes back from war he meets a waitress (Charlotte) who he falls in love with. Unfortunately Emma, Willard's mother, promised God that she would get Willard to marry Helen Hatton Laferty (Mia Wasikowska) if Willard came back alive. Willard marries Charlotte and Helen marries a preacher (Roy Laferty, played by Harry Melling) and has a kid (Lenora Laferty, played by Eliza Scanlen) but stays close to Emma.

At this point Willard was only showing some signs of PTSD, such as recoiling and becoming uneasy whenever he saw a cross and getting into a fight when some townsfolk say some unsavory things about his Charlotte, but she gets deathly sick which takes him to another level.

Willard builds a cross in the backyard of his house and starts praying to it aggressively. He makes his young son, Arvin, pray with him and slaps him when he isn't praying hard enough. He sacrifices their dog which leaves Arvin devastated.

Through some of the first acts of turmoil, Arvin and Lenora arrive under the care of Emma and are raised as brother and sister.

Time skip.

Arvin and Lenora are in high school. Lenora frequents her mothers gravestone. Lenora gets bullied. Arvin protects Lenora from bullies, similar to the way his father protected his mother's honor.

This is around the halfway point of the movie, plus in between all of the scenes of Arvin and his family there are other stories developing. Lee Bodecker (Sebastian Stan) dabbles in corruption as a cop and plans on working his way up to be Sherriff. Sandy Henderson (Riley Keough, Lee's sister in the movie) and Carl Henderson (Jason Clarke) pose as swingers, but are really living lives that are much more sinister.

To experience the rest of the plot you'll have to watch the movie. All of the story above happens in the first half or so of the movie, and as stated in the intro the way the plot connects is an adventure itself.