How’d these “God fearing” Christians get to be so hateful? A narrator describing them, when we can what sons-of-bitches they are for ourselves, is just purple prose piling on, without illuminating or explaining them. As a grim, two-fisted veteran ( Bill Skarsgård) teaches his little boy in “Devil,” “It’s a lotta no-good sons-of-bitches out there.” The movie is full of them. We get it thrown in our face on the TV news every day this election cycle. We know rural Protestant America isn’t “salt of the Earth” righteous. It’s a fundamental flaw of the producer (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”) and occasional director Antonio Campos’ film, one that slows its progress and betrays a kind of patronizing remove from the material. “Serial murderers aren’t the most trusting kind.” And Pollock’s incessant restatement of what we can see with our own eyes, his portentous intoning about the obvious, drags and drags this wallow of rural corruption, perversion, pathology and superstition to a halt. His is an authentic Appalachian voice, and when I pick up the book, I expect to hear it on every page, with every omnisciently-narrated line.īut narration on the printed page and voice-over narration on the screen are two entirely different beasts. Novelist Donald Ray Pollock narrates the film of his “hillbilly Gothic” saga, “The Devil All the Time,” from start to finish - and all points in between.
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