A star­ry ensem­ble sinks into sin in The Dev­il All The Time trailer

While the rest of Hol­ly­wood fig­ures out how best to con­vey their fea­ture slate to a pub­lic strand­ed in their homes, it’s busi­ness as usu­al at Net­flix, where the direct-to-stream­ing busi­ness mod­el has been serv­ing them well as of late. They afford­ed us all an advance peek at Char­lie Kauf­man​’s upcom­ing film just last week, and now today, they’re unveil­ing a trail­er for anoth­er mar­quee title due next month.

Anto­nio Cam­pos’ mid­cen­tu­ry peri­od piece The Dev­il All the Time gath­ers a stel­lar cast of today’s fresh­est tal­ents for a mul­ti-tiered sto­ry of sin and trans­gres­sion in the rur­al ham­let of Knock­em­s­tiff, Ohio. Span­ning decades from the end of World War Two to the begin­ning of the Amer­i­can inva­sion of Viet­nam, the trail­er mounts a broad can­vas con­nect­ing a col­or­ful net­work of damned, doomed souls.

Tom Hol­land leads the ensem­ble as Arvin Rus­sell, an intense young man car­ry­ing a chip on his shoul­der from a life­time of abuse at the hands of his father the sol­dier (Bill Skars­gard). How his path cross­es with every­one else’s remains a mys­tery, but the film will weave in a sus­pect preach­er (Robert Pat­tin­son), a young woman in his thrall (Eliza Scanlen), a smi­ley ingénue (Riley Keough), a pho­tog­ra­ph­er obsessed with her (Jason Clarke), and that doesn’t even account for the likes of Mia Wasikows­ka, Haley Ben­nett, or Sebas­t­ian Stan.

The trail­er obfus­cates more than it clar­i­fies, with the flash­es of a bloody mur­der scene, a cru­ci­fied fig­ure on a war-torn land­scape, and a buck­et of spi­ders poured direct­ly onto a man’s face. Traces of a Goth­ic super­nat­ur­al fit right in with a sto­ry seem­ing­ly about the haz­ards of reli­gious abso­lutism and so-called good coun­try man­ners, where ill inten­tions lurk below placid surfaces.

It’s been four years since the last fea­ture from film­mak­er Anto­nio Cam­pos, the biopic Chris­tine in which Rebec­ca Hall por­trayed sui­ci­dal news­woman Chris­tine Chub­buck (not to be con­fused with the one with Kate Lyn Sheil). That film, his pre­vi­ous effort Simon Killer, and this lat­est film all cen­ter on the moral­i­ty of acts of vio­lence, though his visions of ambi­gu­i­ty have nev­er had so much star-pow­er behind them. Brace for the sweati­est South­ern accents a host of Euro­pean actors can manage!

The Dev­il All the Time will come to Net­flix in the UK and US on 16 September.