Southern Ohio in the years after the Second World War: a backwoods town where desperation, brutality and corruption live side by side. That is the ground Antonio Campos covers in The Devil All the Time, a 2020 American crime drama that runs 138 minutes.
What is The Devil All the Time about?
At the centre stands a young man with one fixed purpose, which is to protect the people he loves. The town around him offers little help. The war is over, but the men who came home still carry it, and their families live with the damage. Hardship has settled over the whole community, and the people who ought to offer shelter or guidance are often the ones doing harm. One after another, a set of sinister figures drift into the young man's orbit, each with a private agenda, and the story follows how their paths close in on his. Several lives are tracked instead of a single thread, so separate strands of violence and corruption draw together across the postwar years and into the sixties. How far he will go to keep his own people safe is the question that pushes everything forward.
About the cast
Tom Holland heads a large ensemble that includes Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Haley Bennett, Eliza Scanlen and Mia Wasikowska. Antonio Campos directs. With eight principal names sharing the screen, the story is carried by the group as much as by any single lead.
Context & significance
The Devil All the Time is catalogued as crime, drama and thriller, and it leans on all three: a crime story in its events, a drama in its attention to family and loss, and a thriller in the way danger tightens around its central figure. The setting matters as much as the plot. Rural Ohio in the postwar decades is shown as a place where the psychological wounds of combat have not healed, and where a community's hardship leaves room for predatory people to operate. It is a United States production with a long running time for the genre, well over two hours, and it uses that length to follow many characters. The tone is dark throughout, so it suits viewers looking for a serious, slow-burning story more than a light evening's entertainment.
Watching The Devil All the Time on Ktime
Ktime offers The Devil All the Time with a Persian dub as well as Persian subtitles. This page is free to read, and a Ktime account login is all you need to start playback. The interface is fully in Farsi, built for Iranians and other Persian speakers living outside the country.