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“Hell is empty and all the Devils are here.” The line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest is often used as a dramatic flourish, a poetic acknowledgment of humanity’s capacity for evil. Barnaby Roper’s debut feature, All the Devils Are Here, treats this quote not as metaphor, but as a literal, claustrophobic blueprint. The film begins where many crime stories end: after the violent heist, with the adrenaline fading and the long, terrible wait beginning.
It places its four criminals not in a safehouse, but in a crucible designed to burn away civility and reveal the monsters beneath. This is a film uninterested in the mechanics of the crime or the thrill of the getaway. Its focus is the suffocating stillness that follows, the slow-motion collapse of four men trapped by their loot, their paranoia, and their own natures. The story strips the British gangster genre of its swagger, leaving only the grim, existential dread of confinement. The result is a grimly effective chamber piece where the true horror is found in the gnawing silence between words.
A Quartet of Damaged Souls
The film’s oppressive atmosphere is brought to life by its four central performances, which together create a volatile ecosystem of fear and aggression. Eddie Marsan, as the veteran Ronnie, is the group’s decaying moral center. He portrays a man from another era of organized crime, one governed by a code of conduct that has no currency in this house.
Marsan carries the physical and emotional weight of a lifetime of bad decisions. His attempts to impose order through mundane routines, like cooking meals of bangers and beans, are the pathetic gestures of a man trying to hold back an inevitable tide of chaos. His performance is a masterful depiction of weary authority, an archetype seen in global cinema from Kurosawa’s samurai to the aging dons of Mumbai’s underworld, all tragic figures whose honor has become their weakness.
Acting as the catalyst for the group’s implosion is Sam Claflin’s Grady, a sadistic psychopath delivered in a career-redefining performance. Claflin sheds his handsome leading-man persona to embody a creature of pure, sniggering impulse. His violence is not strategic; it is a recreational activity, seen in the casual way he plays five finger fillet or speaks of brutality. Claflin uses a coiled, unpredictable energy, making Grady a constant threat. This kind of potent turn against type, where a popular star explores a darker persona, is a powerful tool used by actors globally to challenge audience expectations and demonstrate artistic range.
Adding a layer of surreal unpredictability is Burn Gorman as Numbers. The crew’s accountant is a heroin addict whose primary companions are his drug kit and a reel-to-reel tape player blasting 60s Brit pop. Gorman makes him a greasy, unreadable figure whose shifting allegiances and quiet observations inject a different kind of poison into the house.
His music acts as a jarring counterpoint to the grim silence, an almost cheerful soundtrack to the damnation unfolding. Finally, Tienne Simon offers a quiet, empathetic performance as Royce, the novice getaway driver. He is the audience’s surrogate, his wide-eyed fear reflecting the horror of being trapped with these men. His tentative bond with Ronnie, a doomed father-son dynamic, provides a flicker of humanity before it is inevitably extinguished.
The Architecture of Decay
Barnaby Roper’s direction is confident and controlled, turning the film’s deliberate pacing into a weapon. The tension is not built through action but stretched through agonizingly long takes and an oppressive quiet. The narrative focuses intently on the psychological fallout of the crime, a choice that aligns with the ethos of art-house cinema, which often values interior states over exterior events.
Roper uses stylistic choices like sudden flashbacks to fracture the narrative timeline, mirroring the characters’ own splintering sanity. Time itself seems to dissolve in the safehouse, marked only by dwindling food supplies and escalating hostility.
The house is the film’s most important character. It is a crumbling, damp tomb whose physical decay is a direct reflection of the occupants’ moral rot. The peeling wallpaper, the faulty plumbing, and the encroaching cold are not just set dressing; they are active elements of the characters’ torment. It is a “non-place,” a void outside of society where the rules of the world no longer apply. The cinematography masterfully captures this sense of entrapment.
Bleak, expansive shots of the barren landscape emphasize the house’s isolation, while the interiors are plunged into a claustrophobic, candlelit darkness. This chiaroscuro effect visually places the characters in a space between light and shadow, underscoring their moral ambiguity. The sound design is equally crucial. The oppressive silence is punctuated by the house’s unsettling creaks and the invasive, tinny sound of Numbers’s music, ensuring there is no peace to be found.
From Crime Trope to Shakespearean Parable
The film operates within the familiar framework of the British gangster genre, using its established tropes as a gateway to a much deeper, more philosophical exploration. This method of using genre as a vessel for complex ideas is a hallmark of ambitious filmmaking, seen everywhere from the revisionist Western to the socially conscious Indian crime drama. The story of a heist-gone-wrong and a tense hideout is merely the stage. The play itself is a stark examination of human nature under pressure.
Its title is not an afterthought but the film’s thesis. The narrative brings the quote “Hell is empty and all the Devils are here” to life by demonstrating that hell is not a place one is sent to, but a state one creates. There are no supernatural forces at play; the devils are born from greed, suspicion, and a capacity for violence that festers in isolation.
All the Devils Are Here is a powerful directorial debut, succeeding as an unnerving and intensely atmospheric character study. It proves that a story about four flawed men trapped in a single room can be a profound and terrifying exploration of the human soul, a truth understood by storytellers from the stage of the Globe Theatre to the film sets of today.
The movie “All the Devils Are Here” premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 19, 2025. It is scheduled to have a theatrical release in the United States on September 26, 2025. It will also be released digitally in the UK on September 26, 2025. You can find it on digital platforms for rent or purchase, and it will have a limited cinema release.
Full Credits
Director: Barnaby Roper
Writers: John Patrick Dover
Producers and Executive Producers: Leopold Hughes, Ben LeClair, Barnaby Roper (Executive Producer)
Cast: Sam Claflin, Eddie Marsan, Burn Gorman, Tienne Simon, Suki Waterhouse, Rory Kinnear
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Peter Flinckenberg
Editors: Justin Krohn, Matt Nee
Composer: Peter Raeburn
The Review
All the Devils Are Here
All the Devils Are Here is a potent and suffocating chamber piece, powered by terrific performances and a palpable sense of dread. It successfully transforms a familiar crime story into a bleak psychological parable. While its deliberate pacing may test some viewers, those who appreciate atmospheric, character-driven thrillers will find a confident and unsettling debut that lingers long after the credits roll. It is a stark and effective piece of filmmaking.
PROS
- Outstanding central performances, particularly from a terrifying Sam Claflin.
- A masterfully crafted, claustrophobic atmosphere.
- Confident direction that prioritizes mood and psychological tension.
- Intelligent use of a single location to amplify the drama.
CONS
- The deliberately slow pace may feel sluggish to some audiences.
- The plot is thin, with the focus placed almost entirely on character disintegration.
- Relies on familiar character archetypes from the crime genre.
