“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” screams Ferdinand in The Tempest. His ship has been deliberately wrecked by the magic of Prospero, an embittered ex-King hellbent on revenge. So, too, says Ronnie Blake (Franklin‘s Eddie Marsan), a career thief whose final job for the off-screen mob boss Mr. Reynolds has gone predictably, horribly, wrong. Ronnie is hardly a Shakespearean character, but perhaps All the Devils Are Here is the needlessly morose and leaden version of Shakespeare’s late-career masterpiece, abandoning a slew of thinly-drawn characters on the purgatorial island of a crumbling cottage in the English countryside.

It isn’t as if the directorial debut for Barnaby Roper is lacking a distinct style. Its setup recalls the haunted house sub-genre popularized in English horror of the 1970s and 80s, pushing a band of misfits towards a house which may or may not be teeming with spirits — but its composite form takes that setup and melds it with the paranoiac crime caperism of Reservoir Dogs. That combination should be more fun than it ends up being, but All the Devils Are Here is more sober than it is pulpy, despite the endless bottles of whiskey that Grady (Sam Claflin) consumes.

A Paranoiac Chamber Drama With The Set-Up Of A Horror Film, All the Devils Are Here Is Nowhere Near The Fun That Implies

Part of the problem here is that everybody feels like a proxy. Screenwriter John Patrick Dover’s characters are hollow, all of them inhabiting different reflections on mortality but not much else. Ronnie is reminiscent of so many other veteran thieves from the silver screen, a weathered and philosopher-savant whose sudden turn towards ethical standards hardly feels justified.

H๏τhead Grady sees no reason to ignore his hedonistic desires for Sєx and substances, his penchant for violence only outweighed by his desire for drink. Royce (Tienne Simon, possibly the only alive actor on set) fills in the gaps as the young, scared getaway driver who is desperate to escape the clutches of England’s embedded class.

But it’s hard to care for any of these lowlifes. Banded together through mysterious circumstances revealed in cryptic flashbacks with Mr. Reynolds’ right-hand man, Harold (James Bond’s Rory Kinnear), the group robs a bank with startling efficiency until Grady brutally murders a bank employee out of abject paranoia. In the mad dash to escape, Royce momentarily pulls his eyes off the road, just in time for the car to hit a hooded figure.

After a momentary flash of confusion, Ronnie instructs his young driver to keep driving — which they do, until they reach a meeting point with Reynolds’ accountant, who instructs them to call him Numbers (Burn Gorman). Together, the four retreat to a dilapidated and isolated home which has been stocked with food and drink but not much else: no internet, no television, not even a radio. In the vacuum of space, Ronnie begins to read the only appealing book he can find on the dusty shelves, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

Dickens’ novel tells, in part, of the 18-year imprisonment of a French doctor in the lead up to the Reign of Terror, but Roper and Dover seem interested in reference by invocation, in the same way the тιтle recalls The Tempest. The four pᴀss their days in relative normalcy. Ronnie plays Solitaire, Grady drinks, Numbers locks himself away to do heroin and listen to old records, and Royce waits around for life to change. They’re told they’ll probably be there for “no more than a week,” but when it stretches out, panic sets in, and the characters, unsurprisingly, turn on each other.

All Style, Not Enough Substance To Support Eddie Marsan

All the Devils Are Here is ultimately foisted by its own petard. Because it is a film about a group of criminals unable to escape their circumstances, the film has, quite literally, nowhere to go, which is a problem when your characters are just not all that interesting. To be sure, Roper’s direction is solid and evocative, aided by a truly haunting score by Peter Raeburn.

It’s never unpleasant to be in the company of Eddie Marsan, but his exhaustion at his circumstances becomes ours, too. Its ending turn is so predictable as to elicit merely an eye roll of recognition, making it frustrating that its “twist” isn’t just announced at the top. Then maybe the film’s intentions as a consideration of ethics and morality in the face of mortality could be better realized.

The question implied by Ferdinand’s exclamation in The Tempest is if it is humanity that is responsible for earthly evil rather than something supernatural. And the truth in that play is the same truth in All the Devils Are Here: that it is actually something of both. Perhaps we are meant to leave wondering if we, too, have abandoned basic human decency out of a selfish desire to survive. If that is the case, I wish the film wasn’t so stocked with characters resigned to die.