“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” It’s, of course, a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, one of the Bard’s most succinct explanations for a fundamental flaw of human nature: We are self-destructive, venal creatures, and will tear each other apart out of our own frailties. It’s also, for good and ill, the principle undergirding Barnaby Roper’s elegant, if clunky, British crime thriller “All the Devils Are Here.” Roper, who came up directing music videos, shapes a post-heist getaway between four unscrupulous criminals, all strangers until they get to know each other far too well, with surprising style and panache. It’s a shame, then, that all that table-setting (and a quartet of riveting performances) gives way to agonizingly cheap turns by the end.
“All the Devils Are Here” is styled as a kind of chamber piece amid the plains of Dartmoor, as if the goons from “Reservoir Dogs” holed up in the run-down country estate from “Withnail & I.” The quartet of criminals includes Ronnie (a grizzled Eddie Marsan), a veteran robber whose hard life makes him the default leader of the gang; Grady (Sam Claflin), the wild-eyed maverick whose brute force energy needs to be channeled, lest it get everyone in trouble; an oily accountant simply called “Numbers” (Burn Gorman); and the nervous young driver, Royce (Tienne Simon). They’ve all been tasked by their employer (a stately Rory Kinnear) to rob a bank, a scheme that goes horribly wrong when the car runs over a shape in the middle of the road. Cut to the crooks toddling off to the decrepit country cottage Kinnear has pointed them to, to wait seven days for the heat to die down before he contacts them. Just enough food and water for a week, he says, and under no circumstances are they to leave.
Keeping a quartet of live wires like this under lockdown for one week is hard enough, as “All the Devils”‘s first half indicates. At first, the gang, who barely know, much less trust, each other, do their best to while away the hours with food, drink, drugs, and conversation. But as folk-horror-like intertitles warn us, by “the sixth day,” it’s clear that their employer isn’t sending word. What’s worse, the food’s running out, the toilet’s broken, and everyone’s nerves are frayed. Soon, fatigue and the uncertainty of their plight begin to give way to paranoia and suspicion, which isn’t helped by the quick arrival of a mysterious woman named C (Suki Waterhouse) who sends vague word from their employer that they’re to stay there indefinitely.
From there, “All the Devils Are Here” begins to tip over into the kind of madness you’d expect, as Ronnie’s stalwart attempts to keep heads calm butt up against Grady’s irritating provocations and Numbers’ cagey constitutionals in his bedroom (complete with endless playing of eerie ’60s pop hits from a record player). To their credit, each of the players works fantastically here, playing both in the modes we’ve come to expect them (Marsan as a world-weary geezer, Gorman as a slimy reptilian with secrets aplenty) and out (Claflin gets to entertainingly shuck his dashing leading-man persona, playing a right prick in ways he hasn’t since “The Nightingale”). Simon gets most lost in the shuffle here, which is likely down to screenwriter John Patrick Dover positioning him as the blank slate all the other punters can jockey for loyalty.
In keeping with Roper’s sharp command of style, “All the Devils Are Here” sets an appropriately moody atmosphere. Cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg plays with every dark crevice and overcast windowpane of Steve Summersgill’s production design, contrasting the hardened city criminals against the run-down yet pleasant cottagecore vibes that surround them. Justin Krohn and Matt Nee’s off-kilter editing keeps us off-center, accentuating present tensions with unsettling close-ups of the home’s various knick-knacks, and floating us back to the past with just enough notice to get vital information.
That said, all this style is in service of a fairly formulaic story about volatile men going crazy at the edge of nowhere, with game performances only slightly elevating some fairly archetypal characters. And as the film enters its final act, Dover’s screenplay starts piling on outrageous twists about who these people really are and where they might even be hiding, which grows increasingly tiresome as more twists are stacked on top of each other. Its final minutes might well cause even the most engaged viewers to roll their eyes out of their sockets with the script’s contrivance. The film’s title prompts us to look at Shakespeare, but it might be smarter to turn our attention to Sartre.
