With the exception of 'The Waltons,' most movies and TV series set in the Appalachians tend to be savage affairs.
Most depict the people of the region as hard, God fearing folk, often wrestling with lust and a thirst for bloody revenge.
Antonio Campos' adaptation of Douglas Ray Pollock's 2011 debut novel 'The Devil All The Time' is no different.
Set in southern Ohio and west Virginia, its main characters have twisted mores and are tormented by their faith.
The movie begins with a focus on Bill Skarsgard's Willard Russell, a resident of Coal Creek in West Virginia, returning home from the horrors of the Second World War.
As he heads home to his family, a stop off in southern Ohio results in him falling for Haley Bennett's sweet natured diner waitress Charlotte Willoughby.
Willard marries Charlotte despite attempts by his devout churchgoing mother, Kristin Griffith's Emma Russell to engineer a relationship with a fellow worshipper.
He moves instead to Knockemstiff in Ohio, neat Meade where he and Charlotte have a son.
Worried that their nine year old, Michael Banks Repeta's Arvin is a soft touch for bullies in school, Willard shows him how to deal with his tormentors.
The secret to silencing a bully for good, he tells Arvin, is to bide you time and then exact brutal revenge.
Willard gives him a practical demonstration when they overhear two hunters disrespecting Charlotte while they are praying at a mountain cross.
Driving Arvin into town, he asks the boy to sit in the car while he surprises both men and administers a beating before buying his son a candy bar.
Arvin absorbs the lesson.
However, when they return home, they find Charlotte collapsed on the kitchen floor and are devastated to learn she has cancer.
Plunged into despair, Willard makes Arvin pray out loud with him at the mountain cross for her recovery and even sacrifices the family dog in a desperate bid to persuade God to save the love of his life.
When she passes, he is unable to cope and commits suicide on the night of her funeral.
Arvin is sent to Willard's folks in Coal Creek, where he is raised by Emma and David Atkinson's Great Uncle Earskell alongside Lenora Lafferty, an adopted step sister.
Lenora's mum was Mia Wasikowska's Helen, an avid churchgoer who married a travelling preacher Harry Melling's Roy Lafferty whose schtick includes pouring venomous spiders on himself to show his faith in God has removed all fear.
Helen and Roy disappear during a day trip with his cousin Theodore, played by Pokey LaFarge, having left Lenora with Emma to mind.
Like her mum, the teenage version of Lenora, played by Eliza Scanlen, is tightly wrapped up in her faith and is bullied as a result in high school.
Tom Holland's teenage Arvin, however, is protective of her and after taking a beating from a group of boys for shielding her, he sets about exacting his revenge just like his daddy taught him.
However, when a new smooth talking, young preacher, Robert Pattinson's the Reverend Preston Teagardin arrives in Coal Creek, his appearances sets in train a series of events that will lead to Arvin going on the run.
If this wasn't enough, 'The Devil All The Time' also has a serial killer subplot with Jason Clarke's Carl Henderson and his wife, Riley Keough's Sandy luring drifters to their death.
The couple like to pick up men and offer Sandy as sexual bait while Carl photographs them in flagrante.
They subsequently murder them, developing rolls of film later, keeping the images of their victims as mementos.
Sandy's brother, Sebastian Stan's Lee Bodecker is the local Sheriff who will do anything to ensure nothing or no-one undermines his position of power.
With such an array of roles and sub plots, Campos and Pollocks' characters weave in and out of each others' lives during the course of the film.
But this is no Hillbilly version of a Robert Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson movie.
It is a big screen adaptation of a novel in the conventional mould but it is effectively told.
Campos opts for a voiceover and smartly gets Pollock to provide it.
While narrations often seem like a clunky device, Pollock's involvement surprisingly works, giving 'The Devil All The Time' an air of authenticity.
With the help of English cinematographer Lol Crawley, Campos also proves adept at striking the right tone for a movie for this kind.
The Appalachians is depicted as sweaty, smoky and repressed that recalls Charles Laughton's 'Night of the Hunter' or John Huston's 'Wise Blood'.
It is a land of dark forests with dark secrets and austere, Bible thumping small towns
Church services are theatrical.
Some audiences may not take easily to Pollock and Campos' tale, finding its plot too lurid and sometimes clichéd.
Yet it is a film that oozes atmosphere and it is powered by strong performances.
Tom Holland steps up to the plate with a performance of great maturity as Arvin and he gels well with Eliza Scanlen's Lenora.
Robert Pattinson is suitably slimy as the Reverend Teagardin, while Jason Clarke and Riley Keough are chillingly sleazy as the serial killing couple who become increasingly sloppy as the years pass by.
Waskikowska plays Helen with a fierce fervour, while Scanlen and Melling match her for commitment and intensity.
Freed of the Pennywise makeup, Skarsgard reminds us of his range as an actor in a role which you might have expected Michael Shannon to be devouring.
Griffith, Atkinson and Bennett turn in sturdy supporting performances, while Stan brings a twitchiness to the part of the sheriff.
Douglas Hodge also turns up as a local mobster involved with Bodecker.
It would be easy to be flippant about the Appalachian stereotypes in this drama.
However Campos shows he has a good eye for film noir and he comfortably handles a narrative that shuffles between the Second World War, 1950, 1957 and the start of the Vietnam War in 1963.
It is two and a quarter hours well spent - even if it is a shame that most audiences will consume it on digital devices and smart TVs instead of a cinema.
Blame Covid.
One cannot help feeling, though, it would be refreshing to see an Appalachian movie that isn't all religion, hooch, sexual repression and simmering violence.
But good luck to the filmmaker willing to take on that challenge.
('The Devil All The Time' got a minor cinema release in the United States on September 11, 2020 before being made available worldwide on Netflix on September 16, 2020)
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