Parents' Guide to The Devil All the Time

Parents need to know that The Devil All the Time is an extremely graphic film with disturbing scenes of violence and sex. It offers a largely negative portrayal of religious faith, including a priest who convinces devout teenage girls to have sex with him, a proselytizer who stabs his wife because he thinks he can resurrect her, and a man who kills a dog as a sacrifice to God to save his dying wife. Adapted from a novel, the film depicts rural areas in the 1950s and 1960s as dens of poverty, depravity, corruption, and ignorance. There are war scenes, two suicides, and more than a dozen people killed in a variety of ways shown in graphic detail. Characters maim or kill to teach their kids a lesson, to protect or avenge loved ones, as self-defense, for personal pleasure, or to avoid being exposed as corrupt. A man and a woman are serial killers who lure young men in with sex and then photograph them dead or dying. A series of underexposed photos show the woman in various positions with her victims. Other sex scenes are less graphic in terms of what's shown on-screen, but not in terms of what we understand to be happening, including a woman pleasuring a man in a car, another performing oral sex on the priest, a bar that has rooms in the back with sex workers, two teens about to have sex on a school bus, and teen boys chasing a girl and talking about "hard-ons." Language includes various forms of "s--t" and "f--k" as well as "ass," "hell," "bitch," "damn," "pimp," and "whore." There's also some drinking.

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