The Devil All the Time Ending Explained (2020): Wait, Why Does Sheriff Bodecker Burn the Evidence and Still Hunt Arvin Down, and Where Is Arvin Headed in That Car?

The Devil All The Time Ending Explained: Hmmm…If you just got through the last ten minutes of The Devil All the Time and feel your head is a mess? Arvin drops a dead dog’s bones and his dad’s gun into a hole, covers them up, and walks out of the woods with a sheriff’s body left behind him.

Then he climbs into a stranger’s van and falls asleep while the radio talks about sending more troops to Vietnam. A sad old murder ballad plays, and that’s it. Nobody tells you how it all turns out for him.

If that’s where you are right now, you’re not alone. Most people finish this movie with the same handful of questions. Why did the sheriff come after Arvin when the two dead people were his own sister and her husband? Why did he burn those photos first? What was Arvin even doing back at that cross in the woods? And where is he going with that guy in the van?

Here’s the good news: the movie answers more of this than it seems to. It just hands out the answers in small pieces, spread across two states and twenty years and a lot of characters.

The one thing it leaves open on purpose is Arvin’s future, and I’ll show you exactly what the movie tells us about it and what it doesn’t, so you’re not left guessing. We’ll go question by question instead of in movie order.

Heads Up: We are jumping straight into the deep end of the plot twists now. If you hate spoilers, close your eyes and turn back. (Or, you know, go watch the movie and come right back)!

Who’s Who in The Devil All the Time?

This movie throws a Massive, interconnected cast at you. Here is a quick breakdown to keep everyone straight before we dive in.

Arvin Russell (Tom Holland): Willard and Charlotte’s son, and the person we follow to the end.
Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård): Arvin’s father, a Marine who comes home from the Pacific carrying something he can’t shake.
Charlotte Russell (Haley Bennett): Arvin’s mother, the diner waitress Willard falls for.
Lee Bodecker (Sebastian Stan): The deputy who takes Arvin away from his father’s body, and later a crooked sheriff.
Sandy Henderson (Riley Keough): Lee’s younger sister, who works at the same diner and later helps her husband pick up hitchhikers.
Carl Henderson (Jason Clarke): Sandy’s husband, a photographer who takes pictures of the men they kill.
Lenora Laferty (Eliza Scanlen): Arvin’s adopted stepsister, deeply religious and kind.
Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson): The New preacher in Coal Creek.
Roy Laferty (Harry Melling) and Helen Hatton (Mia Wasikowska): Lenora’s parents.
Emma Russell (Kristin Griffith): Willard’s mother, who raises Arvin and Lenora.
The Narrator (Donald Ray Pollock): The author of the novel the movie is based on.

So How are all these people Connected in the First Place?

It looks like three or four separate stories, but they all trace back to one afternoon in a diner in Meade, Ohio. Willard, fresh out of the war and passing through, sits down and meets Charlotte. At the same counter, Carl meets Sandy, who got the job because her brother Lee helped her land it. Nobody in that room knows it, but this one day sets up everything that comes later.

From there it’s a chain. Years later, Roy Laferty kills his wife Helen in the woods, runs, and gets picked up by Carl and Sandy, who kill him. That leaves Lenora without parents, so Willard’s mother Emma takes her in. After Willard dies, Arvin lands in that same house, and that’s how a boy from Ohio and a girl from West Virginia end up as stepsiblings.

Later, the old preacher in town gets sick and his nephew Preston takes over. Preston is the one who preys on Lenora, which is why Arvin shoots him, which is why Arvin ends up on the road, which is how he gets picked up by the same couple who killed Lenora’s father.

The narrator even says out loud that some people would call all of this dumb luck and others would call it God’s plan. He says it was probably a bit of both. Hold onto that line, because the ending leans on it.

What did Willard teach Arvin before he died?

Almost everything Arvin does in the last stretch of the movie comes from two things his father showed him as a little kid.

The first one happens on a normal afternoon. Willard and Arvin are out at the cross when two hunters walk by and talk dirty about Charlotte. Willard lets it go at the moment. A bit later he drives off, finds one of the men, and beats him half to death while Arvin watches from the car.

Afterward he tells his son that when somebody pushes you, you wait for the right time and finish it. The narrator says it was the best day Arvin ever spent with his dad. That same afternoon ends with Charlotte collapsing at home.

The second lesson is the prayer. When the doctors say Charlotte’s cancer can’t be fixed, Willard decides God can be pushed into helping if you pray hard enough and give something up. He makes Arvin pray beside him, slaps him when he cries, and then shoots Jack, the family dog, and hangs it on the cross as an offering.

Charlotte dies anyway. Willard kills himself at the cross, and Arvin is the one who finds him, with the dead dog hanging above.

So Arvin walks away from his childhood with two lessons. Violence works if you’re patient. And praying doesn’t work. He says out loud as a kid that he’s done praying, and he sticks to that for years. Keep both lessons in mind, because the ending is Arvin finally using one and quietly reconsidering the other.

Why does Arvin go after Preston the way he does?

This is the only killing in the movie that Arvin plans, and he plans it like his father taught him.

After Lenora dies, Arvin finds out from a local man that she was pregnant. He puts it together and starts watching Preston. By his own words later, he spends a couple of weeks tracking him, and he sees Preston going after another young girl in the congregation. Then he writes a goodbye letter to his grandmother, because he knows he’s not coming back, and walks into the church.

What he does next is smart and cold. He sits down like any other sinner who wants to confess, and he tells Preston a made-up story about a man who can’t stop himself around a coworker’s daughter. It’s really Preston’s own habits, told back to him.

Once Preston realizes he’s been watched, he starts lying right away. He blames Lenora and says she was crazy and made it all up. When Arvin says she was just lonely, Preston has nothing left, and Arvin shoots him.

The Narrator tells us earlier that Arvin always picked his moments, just like Willard. This is that, done right. And it’s also the point where Arvin stops being a kid who hits back and becomes someone who kills on purpose. Everything after this is a result of that choice.

Why do Carl and Sandy pick Arvin up when they have a rule against it?

When Arvin’s car dies and he starts hitchhiking toward Meade, he’s about to meet the same couple who killed Lenora’s father fifteen years earlier. The film makes it clear that this wasn’t a random stop.

By this point it’s summer 1965 and Carl and Sandy are getting ready for what the narrator says is their fourteenth road trip. They always pick up strangers from far away, never anyone from home. But when they spot Arvin, Sandy points out that he’s heading to Ohio and says that’s against the rule.

Carl brushes it off and says let’s just see where he’s going. The narrator has already told us that Carl liked good-looking young men for his photos, and Arvin fits.

There’s a dark joke in all this too. Carl and Sandy don’t know who Arvin is, and Arvin doesn’t know who they are. Arvin is the son of the man who took Carl’s seat at that diner counter, and he’s sitting in their back seat, and none of the three of them can see it. The film never explains why Carl bends his own rule, and I don’t think it needs to. He wants what he wants.

Why were Sandy’s bullets blanks, and why does that decide who lives?

Carl pulls over by a field and says he needs to take a leak. He wanders off, talking about the sunset and how he wants to get a few shots in while the light’s good. Sandy stays near Arvin, and the narrator tells us that she’s thinking about killing Carl and driving away with the boy. She’s been wobbling for a while.

She packed the car early one morning, and Carl caught her and reminded her they never pack early. She snapped at him in the house. She told him she didn’t like this anymore.

When Carl comes back to start his routine, Arvin is ready. He has already picked up on the fact that Carl is carrying a gun. He shoots Carl twice. Sandy raises her gun, and Arvin begs her to put it down. She fires. Nothing happens. Arvin shoots her.

The narrator explains why in one line. Carl had noticed Sandy was acting off, and he didn’t trust her, so before the trip he swapped her bullets for blanks. He wanted to be the only one in the car who could shoot.

That means the one thing that saved Arvin was the trick Carl pulled on his own wife. And it means Sandy, who may have been about to turn on Carl, was killed because Carl didn’t trust her to stay loyal.

Why does Lee burn the photos and still hunt Arvin?

This is where the plot gets messy, so let’s pump the brakes.

Lee is a sheriff in the middle of a re-election race, and everything he has is held together with bribes. He takes money from a local boss named Leroy. His opponent has been telling voters he looks the other way about his sister’s work. He’s already worried that if people start digging into Sandy, they’ll find him too.

When Lee gets the call that Sandy and Carl are dead, he drives out to the scene. He finds one of Carl’s photos there, and even with his baby sister dead in front of him, the narrator says he can’t help thinking about his own situation and What else could get exposed if he doesn’t clean up the mess first. He goes to their place and burns Carl’s whole stack of pictures.

Here’s the thing, though. Burning the photos only covers one half of the problem. There’s still one person who knows what Carl and Sandy were. When Sheriff Thompson calls from West Virginia about a preacher who was shot with a Luger, Lee asks if it was a nine millimeter, because that’s what killed his sister. The name Arvin Russell is also one he knows from the night Willard died. That’s how he puts the pieces together.

So Lee isn’t chasing Arvin to arrest him, and he isn’t doing it out of grief. He’s going after Arvin to make sure nobody ever hears what Sandy did. Arvin only learns about Lee’s sister when a local man mentions she and her husband were found dead near town.

That’s when it seems to sink in for him that the couple he shot were Lee’s family, and it’s why that walk up to the cross is about to turn dangerous.

What Happens at the Prayer log, and why does Arvin go back there?

Right after he kills Preston, the narrator says Arvin feels a pull toward Knockemstiff. He has to fix some things about his father that still bother him. And he’s got something he promised Jack as a boy: when his dad went to sleep, he’d bring Jack down and give him a proper burial. That never happened.

When he gets to Meade, a local man tells him the old house burned down years ago. He goes up to the cross regardless, where he remembers Lee sitting with him right after his father’s death.

Lee told him, “Some people were born just so they could be buried.” Then comes the one line that shows Arvin has finally understood his father. It finally clicks for him that his father’s death wasn’t really a choice, just a desperate need to follow his wife wherever she went.

That’s when Lee shows up. He fires at a bird by accident, then calls out in a friendly voice and says he only wants to talk. Arvin knows better. Shots go back and forth. Arvin tells him he’s not a bad person and says the preacher had it coming.

Then he says the thing that really matters: your sister and her husband weren’t good either, and I’ve got a photo to prove it. Lee doesn’t listen, and the shooting starts. Arvin wins.

The narrator says it feels like hours to Arvin, but it only takes Lee a few minutes to die, and Arvin has to listen to him fight for it. He says he had no choice. Once Lee is gone, Arvin leaves the photo of Sandy and a dead man on his body.

Whoever finds the sheriff will also find proof of what his sister did, which means all that burning didn’t work. Then Arvin finishes what he came to do. He puts Jack’s bones in the hole, sets the Luger in with them, and covers it all up.

Why does Arvin bury the Luger with the dog?

The movie doesn’t explain this out loud, so here’s what I think is going on, and I think it’s two things at once.

The practical reason is the easy one. That Luger is the only thing tying Arvin to four killings. The Luger is what points Sheriff Thompson toward Arvin for the preacher, and Lee himself noticed it was the same caliber that killed his sister. If the gun is gone, so is the proof.

The other reason has to do with what the gun means. Willard’s Luger and Jack’s bones are the two things Arvin got from his father: the weapon and the sacrifice. Earskell hands him the pistol on his birthday and says it’s time to pass it on.

Jack is what Willard’s faith took from Arvin. By putting both of them under the same cross, in the same spot where his father died, Arvin is closing a chapter that his dad started.

It’s not a clean ending, though. He used that gun on four people, and the first was no accident. Burying it doesn’t undo any of that. The movie seems to know this, which is why the next scene doesn’t feel like a victory.

Who’s the guy in the van, and why Cincinnati?

Arvin walks out of the woods and onto the road. A long-haired man in a VW van stops and tells him he looks like he’s had a rough day. Arvin says he hasn’t figured out where he’s going yet, and the man says he’s headed to Cincinnati. Arvin says he’s been meaning to get up that way. That’s the whole conversation.

The film never gives the driver a name, and he’s not meant to be anybody special. Co-writer Paulo Campos told the blog Taylor Holmes Inc. that the novel stops with Arvin on the road hoping for a ride, and the film wanted to show a little of what comes next.

He said a driver from a recognizable culture was a way to peek outside the Knockemstiff and Coal Creek world. In his interview with GamesRadar, director Antonio Campos put it this way: “In the book, you don’t end in Arvin’s head.” So the van scene is the filmmakers’ addition, built to let us sit inside Arvin’s mind for a minute.

As for Cincinnati, there’s no deeper meaning in the text. It’s a big city in the direction away from everything he just left. He doesn’t have a plan, he doesn’t know anyone there, and he accepts the first ride that’s heading away.

What is Arvin thinking in that last scene, and does he go to Vietnam?

This is where the movie gets quiet. The narrator tells us Arvin fights hard to stay awake in a stranger’s car, but his mind starts going places anyway. Here’s what he thinks about, in order:

Maybe the law will see that he did good, and he’ll get forgiven.

Maybe he’ll see his grandmother and his uncle again, though that might be too risky.

Maybe he’ll meet a girl and start a family, like his dad did. A dog barks in his head, and he can’t tell if he’s going backward or forward.

Then the thought of enlisting creeps in. He doesn’t want a war like his dad’s, but he’s good at fighting, and maybe that’s where he belongs.

And then he thinks about his grandmother telling him to pray on it. He used to laugh at that. Now he wonders if she knew something he didn’t.

All the while, the radio is playing a speech from President Johnson about sending more troops to Vietnam. The movie opened with Willard in one war, and now Arvin is sitting in a van while the country gets ready for another.

That’s not an accident. In his Inverse interview, Antonio Campos said the ending isn’t supposed to give an answer. It’s supposed to leave a question about whether Arvin becomes one of the damaged veterans or finds another way out.

He told GamesRadar he wanted the ending to feel a little more hopeful than the book’s, though not a happy one. I think that’s right. There’s no sign Arvin decides anything in this scene.

What the film shows is a young man who hasn’t had a calm minute in a long time, finally falling asleep in a stranger’s car, with every future still possible. The song that closes the movie, “Bank of the Ohio,” is a murder ballad, so the film doesn’t send us off on a sweet note either.

Is it God or just dumb luck that keeps tying these people together?

The movie never picks a side, and I think that’s deliberate.

On one hand, the coincidences are almost too neat. The diner. The preacher’s nephew shows up in time to ruin Lenora. The couple who killed her father ended up in the car with Arvin. Arvin survived because someone swapped bullets. It’s easy to read all of that as a plan.

On the other hand, plenty of it looks like plain bad luck. Lenora changes her mind about ending her life, and slips anyway. Willard’s prayers and the dog’s death change nothing. Roy’s attempt to bring Helen back leaves her dead in the woods. In the Inverse interview, Antonio Campos asked the question out loud: is there a grand design, or is everything by chance? He left it for us to decide.

Arvin’s last thoughts bring it back to this. His grandmother’s advice to pray on it doesn’t mean the movie is saying God is real. It means Arvin, who’s spent his life dismissing prayer because of his father, is willing to consider it again. After everything, that’s a bigger change than it sounds.

Wrap Up: Making Sense of Those Final Minutes!

Arvin takes two things from his father. He keeps the violence, and for most of the movie he drops the prayer. By the end, he’s buried the physical reminders of both and is sitting in a van with one of those lessons shaken loose. He’s still the guy who just killed four people, and he knows it.

But he’s also alive, out of both towns, with nobody holding a gun on him and a ride heading somewhere new. That’s why the ending feels so strange. It isn’t a happy one, but it isn’t a hopeless one either.

What happens after is up to us, and the film makes sure we know it. He could end up in Vietnam like his father in the Pacific, he could try to settle down, or he could find his way back to the people who love him.

The movie shows him thinking about each one and picking none. You’re left in the same spot Arvin is: tired, free for the moment, and not sure which road is going backward and which is going forward.

If you’re interested, you can check out our Beau is Afraid ending explained here!

TL;DR: Quick Breakdown

Arvin shoots Sheriff Lee Bodecker at his dad’s old prayer log. Lee came to make sure the only witness to his sister’s crimes never talks.
Lee burned Carl’s photos because proof of what Sandy did would have wrecked his re-election and pulled his own dirty dealings into the open.
Arvin leaves one of Carl’s photos on Lee’s body so the truth about Carl and Sandy doesn’t die with the sheriff.
He buries his dog’s bones and Willard’s Luger at the cross, which finishes a promise he made to the dog as a kid and gets rid of the gun that ties him to four killings.
A man in a van picks him up and heads for Cincinnati. The movie never says what Arvin does next.
On the ride, Arvin goes back and forth between a normal life, enlisting, and maybe praying on it. The film leaves that open on purpose.

FAQs: Most Googled Ones!

Does Arvin get away with the Murders?

The movie never says, but he leaves the scene alone with a photo as the only proof anyone else will find, and the film ends before anyone catches up to him.

Is the man who gives Arvin a ride supposed to be Charles Manson?

No, co-writer Paulo Campos flatly told Taylor Holmes inc. that he isn’t.

Who is the Narrator in The Devil All the Time?

It’s Donald Ray Pollock, the author of the novel the movie is based on.

Does Arvin End up going to Vietnam?

The film doesn’t say; it only shows him weighing it in the last few minutes.

About the Author.

Hi, I’m Vansh, the founder of Vibe On Cue. I track the absolute best ways to experience cinema, from the biggest Hollywood Blockbusters and upcoming release dates to the finest details of PVOD & Streaming and pristine Blu-ray & 4K physical media. And when the credits roll, I break down the narrative with deep-dive Ending explained guides. If you live for the full life cycle of film, stick around and explore the site!