The Devil All the Time: Worth Watching? Plot, Cast, Ending

Faith and violence tangle together in The Devil All the Time — a 2020 Netflix psychological thriller that forces viewers to sit with that darkness for nearly two and a half hours. If you’ve heard the name and wondered whether it earns its reputation, you’re in the right place.

Release Year: 2020 ·
Director: Antonio Campos ·
Based On: Novel by Donald Ray Pollock ·
Setting: Rural Ohio and West Virginia ·
Runtime: 138 minutes

The table below consolidates essential facts about the film into a scannable format.

Is it Worth Watching The Devil All the Time?

Whether this film rewards your time depends heavily on what you’re bringing to it. It’s not a conventional thriller, and it doesn’t apologize for what it is.

Pros and Cons

Audience vs Critic Reception

The gap between audience and critical scores tells its own story. Rotten Tomatoes shows a 14-point divergence: critics landed at 64% while audiences scored it 78% (Wikipedia). Metacritic’s critics aggregate sits at 56/100. Viewers who connected with the film’s wavelength often rave about it; those who couldn’t find footing report feeling manipulated by its darkness. Reddit discussions remain active years later, with fans debating whether the violence serves the themes or overwhelms them.

What is the Main Plot of The Devil All the Time?

The film weaves together several storylines set in rural Ohio and West Virginia, spanning the 1950s and 1960s. What connects them is a recurring question: what happens when faith becomes a tool of harm?

Key Characters

Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård) is a Vietnam veteran who believes God will cure his wife Charlotte’s cancer if he sacrifices their dog’s life at a roadside cross. Charlotte dies anyway. Willard then takes his own life at that same cross, and his young son Arvin (Tom Holland) discovers both bodies (Wikipedia).

Orphaned Arvin goes to live with his grandmother Emma, who has also taken in Lenora, a girl whose parents died under suspicious circumstances. The parallel between these orphaned children anchors the film’s thematic core. When Lenora is sexually assaulted by the charismatic preacher Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson), she becomes pregnant. She attempts suicide by hanging but accidentally kills herself (GamesRadar).

Arvin learns the truth and hunts Preston down, eventually shooting him in the woods — a final act that closes one violent cycle while the film’s thematic questions remain open.

Timeline Overview

The narrative unfolds roughly chronologically, though with significant crosscutting between storylines. The post-WWII setting grounds everything in a specific American moment when returning veterans, small-town isolation, and institutional religion created particular pressures on rural communities. The 1960s setting allows the film to reference changing social conditions without being distracted by them.

Was The Devil All the Time a Hit?

Defining “hit” gets complicated when a title releases exclusively on streaming. Netflix has never disclosed specific viewership data, which means the commercial question doesn’t have clean answers.

Box Office and Streaming Performance

The film debuted simultaneously in limited theatrical release and on Netflix on September 16, 2020. Without theatrical tracking to anchor expectations, analysts can only infer success from Netflix’s continued investment in similar dark fare. The platform has greenlit several psychological thrillers with comparable tonal profiles since, suggesting the 2020 title found its audience — even if that audience was numerically smaller than a theatrical hit would require.

Awards and Nominations

Robert Pattinson received nominations for Best Supporting Actor from the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Detroit Film Critics Society (Wikipedia). The film’s cinematography earned recognition from the American Society of Cinematographers. Notably, it was not nominated for major Academy Awards, which tracks with its mixed critical reception at prestige level.

What this means: The Devil All the Time connected with viewers who found it, earned respect from industry professionals who noticed the craft, and remains a cult favorite without breaking into mainstream awards contention.

Is the Movie The Devil All the Time Based on a True Story?

No. The Devil All the Time is a fictional work adapted from Donald Ray Pollock’s 2011 novel of the same name. No real crimes or individuals are depicted.

Source Material

Pollock, who grew up in southern Ohio, crafted the novel with clear autobiographical resonances — the settings, the class anxieties, the specific flavor of rural religious experience. But when asked about inspiration, Pollock has described the book as fiction built from cultural texture rather than documented events (GamesRadar).

Real-Life Inspirations

The film doesn’t claim any specific real-life inspirations, though certain storylines echo documented American crimes involving predatory clergymen and desperate rural violence. Director Antonio Campos has spoken about approaching the material as a character study rather than a social-problem message. The horror comes from human psychology, not supernatural or extraordinary circumstances.

The Devil All the Time Ending Explained

The film’s conclusion resolves its narrative mechanics while leaving its deeper questions deliberately open. Understanding what happens — and why it matters — requires unpacking both the plot mechanics and the thematic architecture.

Key Twists

After Lenora’s death, Arvin learns she was pregnant. He stalks Preston and observes him grooming another young girl, confirming his suspicions about who fathered Lenora’s child (Wikipedia). Arvin then hunts Preston down in the woods, where he shoots and kills him.

The twist that lands hardest: the cycle doesn’t end with justice. Arvin shoots Preston, drives away, and is presumably arrested. The ending credits roll over a final image that returns us to where the film began — a suggestion that violence begets violence, and individual acts of retribution don’t break collective patterns.

Themes of Sacrifice

Three characters attempt sacrifice to change their circumstances. Willard sacrifices his dog to save Charlotte. Lenora sacrifices herself to escape shame. Arvin sacrifices Preston to avenge Lenora. None of these sacrifices produces redemption. This is the film’s darkest argument: that American mythology around sacrifice as a pathway to grace is itself a kind of delusion.

The implication: Arvin’s action is understandable, even morally defensible, but it doesn’t free him from the conditions that shaped him. The rural landscape that enabled Preston’s predation remains intact. His grandmother Emma still tends her garden. The townsfolk still gossip. Justice was done, but nothing was healed.

The pattern: individual virtue cannot repair structural failure. Arvin is righteous. The system around him is not.

Related reading: Flight Risk (Film) – Plot, Cast, Release and Reviews · Cast of the Black Phone 2 – Full List of Actors and Roles

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