I’ve always found it a little unsettling how differently people can exist in the lives of others. Someone can be the kindest person in one room and the reason someone else struggles to sleep at night. Someone can be admired, trusted and spoken highly of by almost everyone around them, while someone else carries an entirely different version of who they are. And more often than not, both versions can be true.

I think that’s what makes The Devil All the Time (2020), directed by Antonio Campos, particularly disturbing. It isn’t a conventional horror film. There are no supernatural creatures hiding in the dark or unexplained noises designed to make you jump. Instead, it explores something I find considerably harder to dismiss: the capacity of ordinary people to inflict extraordinary amounts of suffering on one another.

Set in post-war America, the film follows a series of interconnected lives shaped by violence, religious fanaticism, trauma and desperation. Tom Holland plays Arvin Russell, a young man trying to navigate a world that has given him far too many reasons to distrust it. Robert Pattinson plays a preacher whose public righteousness conceals something deeply disturbing, while Bill Skarsgård appears as Arvin’s father, a man whose own suffering leaves its mark on the next generation.

What stayed with me was not simply the violence. It was how easily cruelty could disguise itself as morality.

We like to imagine that bad people are easy to identify. We expect them to look suspicious, speak maliciously or make their intentions obvious. Real life, however, rarely offers us that convenience. Some of the most damaging people are charming. Some are respected by entire communities. Some genuinely believe they are good people, and perhaps that is what makes them so frightening. They do not always think they are doing something wrong.

The film’s portrayal of religious hypocrisy makes this particularly difficult to watch. Faith, which can be a source of comfort, hope and belonging, becomes a tool for manipulation in the hands of people who want power over others. It made me think about how often we accept someone’s actions simply because of the position they occupy in our lives. A parent, a teacher, a leader, a partner or anyone who has earned the trust of a community can sometimes escape scrutiny that would otherwise be unavoidable.

I have noticed how easily reputation can influence the way we interpret people’s behaviour. When someone is generally liked, we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. When someone is disliked, even their most ordinary actions can become questionable. We often end up defending the version of a person we know rather than considering the experiences of those who know a very different version of them. Sometimes, we mistake confidence for character and authority for integrity.

And then there is the film’s treatment of trauma.

Arvin’s life is shaped by suffering that began long before he could understand it. He inherits a world full of violence and learns to survive in it the only ways he knows how. The film does not suggest that suffering automatically makes people better. If anything, it explores how pain can change people in ways they never intended and how the consequences of one person’s choices can outlive them by generations.

I think this is one of the harder things to accept about real life, too. People do not exist independently of what has happened to them. Someone’s anger may have a history. Someone’s inability to trust may have been learned through years of disappointment. Someone who seems difficult to love may have spent most of their life believing they were unworthy of it.

But understanding someone’s pain is not the same as excusing the pain they inflict on others.

That distinction matters. We can acknowledge that people are products of their circumstances without pretending that their circumstances absolve them of responsibility. Otherwise, we risk turning every act of cruelty into an explanation and every explanation into an excuse.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about The Devil All the Time is how little distance there is between the world on screen and the world outside it. The setting may be decades old and thousands of miles away, but the underlying struggles feel familiar. People trying to survive circumstances they never chose, people searching for meaning in suffering and people using the language of goodness to justify things that are anything but good.

We see versions of these contradictions everywhere. In families where love becomes control. In relationships where devotion becomes possession. In institutions where protecting a reputation matters more than protecting a person. In communities where everyone knows something is wrong, but nobody wants to be the first to say it aloud.

There is also something worth reflecting on in the way the film portrays morality. We are usually comfortable identifying ourselves as the reasonable ones, the ones who would have acted differently if placed in someone else’s situation. It is easy to condemn cruelty when we are watching it happen to someone else. It is harder to recognise the moments when our own fear, prejudice, ambition or desire for acceptance makes us complicit in it.

I don’t think the answer is to become suspicious of everyone. A life spent expecting the worst from people is its own kind of tragedy. But perhaps we should be more willing to question the people we admire, more careful about the authority we grant others and less eager to dismiss experiences that contradict the version of someone we have chosen to believe.

By the time the film ends, there is no satisfying sense that the world has been set right. The damage has already been done, and not every wound receives closure. That is precisely what makes the story linger. Life does not always arrange itself into neat endings where the guilty are punished, the innocent are protected and suffering finally makes sense.

Sometimes, people survive. Sometimes, they carry what happened to them into the rest of their lives. And sometimes, the only justice available is the decision not to become the very thing that hurt them.

The Devil All the Time is not a film I would recommend to someone looking for a fun Halloween scare. It is bleak, disturbing and, at times, deeply uncomfortable to sit through. But for those willing to look beyond the violence, it offers something more unsettling than a conventional horror story.

It reminds us that evil does not always announce itself. It can speak softly, wear familiar faces and sit comfortably within the very systems we trust to keep us safe.

And perhaps that is the real horror of human nature: not that people are capable of terrible things, but that sometimes they can do them without ever believing they are the villains of their own stories.