

The Devil All the Time Looks Like a Blood-Soaked Take on the Southern Gothic

Netflix has shared the first trailer for the buzzy Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and Sebastian Stan film.

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Movies have been premiering on streaming platforms and on-demand during the pandemic, but it feels like it's been a long time since we've seen a truly starry production, one with multiple A-listers and Oscars buzz. But Netflix's upcoming film, The Devil All the Time, looks very much like one of those movies. It's got a cast that includes Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, and is based on a novel by acclaimed author Donald Ray Pollock. We're still around a month out from its release, but Netflix just dropped a brand-new trailer—so here's everything we know about the film so far.

The film stars Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and other big names.

The Devil All the Time is a family saga in the southern gothic style, and features Spider-Man star Tom Holland as lead character Arvin Russell, while Tenet's Robert Pattinson plays preacher Preston Teagardin. The cast also includes IT star Bill Skarsgard, Sebastian Stan of The Avengers, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Mia Wasikowska, Sharp Objects' Eliza Scanlen, and Haley Bennett. The film was directed by Antonio Campos, who's best known for his 2016 movie Christine, which starred Rebecca Hall as Christine Chubbuck, a real-life news reporter who struggled with depression and ultimately committed suicide on live television in 1974.

Here's Netflix's official synopsis of the project:

In Knockemstiff, Ohio and its neighboring backwoods, sinister characters—an unholy preacher (Robert Pattinson), twisted couple (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough), and crooked sheriff (Sebastian Stan)—converge around young Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family. Spanning the time between World War II and the Vietnam war, director Antonio Campos’ ‘The Devil All the Time’ renders a seductive and horrific landscape that pits the just against the corrupted.
The Devil All the Time

The movie is based on a 2011 novel of the same name.

The movie is based on Donald Ray Pollock's debut novel, which follows the Russell family over several decades in the real town of Knockemstiff, Ohio and West Virginia. Apparently, the story is brutally blood soaked noir filled with scenes of animal sacrifice, rape, and murder.

Here's the how The New York Times described the tale in its review:

The story begins with the return of a veteran, Willard Russell, from the Pacific island abattoir of World War II, where he has seen a fellow soldier skinned and crucified alive. He carries this vision home, but as the novel proceeds and the lives of Willard’s mother, his uncle and especially his son carry forward, the Russell clan is beset on all sides by nightmares the equal of anything Willard experienced in combat.

If the story begins with a guy witnessing a crucifixion, the rest of the story definitely gets very, very dark.

The trailer looks deeply, deeply intense.


On August 13, Netflix dropped a trailer for the movie, and its tagline, "Some people are just born to be buried," is very much in keeping with how dark the project looks. The trailer begins with Holland's Arvin Russell receiving his father's gun for his birthday, and introduces his dad (Skarsgard) via flashback, as well as Clarke and Keough's murderous drifters, and Pattinson's menacing preacher.

"How and why people from two points on a map without even a straight line between them can be connected is at the heart of our story at Knockemstiff," says the voice over. It definitely seems like Arvin is going to put that gun to use.

The film will debut next month.

Alongside his brother Paulo, Campos wrote the screenplay for the film. "It was a hard book to adapt also because there was so much that we loved," Campos told EW. "I’m a big fan of southern gothic and noir and this was a perfect marriage of the two. Sometimes you might be adapting a piece and you think like, 'Well, there is a seed of a good idea here and I’ll just throw everything away and start from scratch.' In this case it was like, we love everything!”

The Devil All the Time premiers on Netflix on September 16th.

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