With all the unspeakable tragedies and acts of evil currently stirring our world, it seems a movie like The Devil All the Time was inevitable. Movies, and particularly Netflix-produced ones that can reach a broader audience, are often good reminders of our present day affairs. Fictional worlds tend to cut deeper when they allude to events and characters reminiscent of their real life counterparts. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that we learn from these worlds, but I would argue they help us further realize certain truths about the society we belong to, and the issues that come with it. At the same time, the conclusions drawn from these movies can feel quite underwhelming.
Considering the effort and talent put into Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time, released on Netflix this past month, I couldn’t help but feel like the film did a poor job of transmitting whatever message or idea it was trying to convey about evil. Thus, today I wanted to compare Campos’ latest feature with the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, as both movies treat evil in a similar fashion, however one does it considerably better than the other.

The story of The Devil All the Time is a complex web of families torn apart by the brutal nature of mankind in the American Midwest. A war veteran returns home only to find himself haunted by the ghosts of the past that ultimately spur him onto a path of religiously-driven violence. This violence then is passed onto his son and the people around him. The world of The Devil All the Time is populated by men and women, housewives, preachers, cops and crooks, whose understanding of God and faith in general revolves completely around the notion of sacrifice by blood. By hurting others, these troubled characters are lead to believe in their own salvation. One of the recurring lines of this film, ”There’s a lot of no-good sons of bitches out there. You just got to pick the right time (to hurt them),” echoes ad nauseam, to the point that the movie itself becomes a tiresome cycle of endless violence committed by people whose traumatic past is the only reason they keep moving forward.

This is my major issue with the movie. It works only on a single level. It views the world from a single perspective, and never even dares to contradict this worldview by injecting it with a more sophisticated reflection other than that we are the products of our environment and there is no escaping it. And this, I find inexcusable. Because commenting on important matters such as evil, violence, treachery, manipulation, in the way that Campos tries to, is often the perfect way for sweeping such matters under the rug and labeling these movies as pure entertainment. Which is a shame, because if we look at No Country for Old Men, we see that cinema can make a difference with regard to how complex fictional worlds can be.

Similarly to The Devil All the Time, the Coen Brothers’ Best Picture winner of 2007 is a tale about evil inevitably finding its way into society, and how the nature of this evil, seemingly so simple and primitive, makes it an unstoppable force, a force that perhaps we will never fully understand.
Both movies have evil men in them, men whose only drive is to hurt, kill and humiliate whatever and whoever stands in their way. The main difference, however, lies in the good characters that populate these movies. In Campos’ film, there isn’t any hope for anybody. Any signs of kindness are limited to the bare minimum, because the film wants to be consistent with its nihilistic outlook on life. Kindness equals weakness. Nothing is of value. Everything and everybody dies, ”You just got to pick the right time.”
On the other hand, No Country for Old Men, though it presents us with one of the most terrifying villains in movie history, Anton Chigurh, and a grim death-filled desert landscape where laws don’t apply to everyone the same way, it also gives us characters worth believing in. Llewelyn Moss, our unlucky protagonist who finds himself in the middle of a drug deal gone wrong and with someone else’s bagful of money in his lap, is still at the very core a good man, with dreams and aspirations of building a better, more secure life for himself and his wife, Carla Jean.
Tommy Lee Jones also plays a good character, Sheriff Bell, a character that for the majority of the movie tries to grasp the extent to which evil men like Anton are willing to go for the sake of what? Money? Drugs? Fame? He can’t put a pin on it, and that is what scares him – a good, lawful man – the most.

And that is I think where the main difference lies between these two equally competently made films. Whereas The Devil All the Time states loud and clear that there is simply no escaping evil that surrounds you, evil that you’re born into, as Tom Holland’s protagonist, the son of a suicidal war veteran and the step brother of a girl that died at the hands of a crooked preacher, is eventually driven to inflicting the same kind of merciless violence on others, No Country for Old Men refuses to fall into a similar trap. The film takes a moral stand through its literary opening written by Cormac McCarthy (the author of the novel), when Sheriff Bell narrates about the time he put a man on the electric chair and the man, a cold blooded murderer, till the very end continued to say he would happily kill again if he were given the chance to. And in the face of this unflinching evil that has no head nor tail to make of, Bell openly admits, ” I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it’s my job to fight it but I don’t know what it is anymore. More than that, I don’t want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I’ll be part of this world.”

No Country for Old Men works as a moral tale because not only does it present the crumbling reality of a dying breed of men not accustomed to this kind of senseless violence and inexplicable evil – it also shows that there is a way of avoiding it, that sometimes, by not succumbing to the way of the gun, we may be able to go out on our own terms, with pride and dignity. Is this argument a little too far-fetched? A little too romanticized? Perhaps, but good movies are meant to give us options, not force us into a single, badly constructed worldview. The nihilism and dread of The Devil All the Time serve little to no purpose other than to tell a grim story of hopelessness and despair motivated by religious misconceptions. Whatever Campos and Pollock (author of the novel) tried to do in adapting the book to the screen doesn’t work. Because yes, evil exists. And yes, bad people do bad things. And sometimes good people are forcefully driven to similar acts, but if we look carefully, there should always be, no matter how slim or faint, a ray of light at the end of the tunnel.