The Devil to Pay is a 2020 drama about a struggling farmer in an isolated Appalachian community who fights to save her son.
On a small farm in the Appalachian backcountry, Lemon Cassidy (Danielle Deadwyler) and her husband Tarlee (Donnie Johnson) work to raise their young son Coy (Ezra Haslam). It’s not an easy life, but it’s theirs, though this peaceful isolation is broken when one morning, Tarlee goes missing. Not long after, she is called to visit the home of Tommy Runion (Catherine Dyer), the head of a family who hold power over the mountainside and she’s also not happy Tarlee has disappeared and says if he doesn’t show up soon, she’s going to kill Coy as payment for work the man owes. It’s the first move in an escalating nightmare of violence that thrusts Lemon in the middle of a family war.
Written and directed by Lane and Rukus Skye, The Devil to Pay is an old tale cut from worn fabric as an innocent becomes embedded in the horrors of something well beyond their reach. In this case, it’s the diminutive Lemon, who just wants to work her small farm and tend to little Coy, telling him morality tales of a heavy world while teaching him how to work the land. She comes face-to-face with the masculine-named female matriarch Tommy, who grips her domain in ruinous apathy in the guise of a sweet-talking baking grandmotherly type. It only leads to trouble.
Violence comes of course as it must in this type of film, with Lemon forced to reckon for a debt Tarlee owes, but unable with no money and means, left to fight for her life and the future of her son. With plucky guitar strings and long halting images of a setting stuck in a sort of detached folklore-ish landscape populated by people not like ourselves, we travel with Lemon through this hell as darkness further spoils upon her once tested but stable existence.
It has its appeal in the beginning, with a not so subtle shadow that crawls across the mountaintops as an opening exposition details the setting and then rests up Lemon as she tries to raise Coy. Deadwyler, who has well-established herself in television, is just about perfectly cast as the young mother befallen great evil, creating a genuinely grounded woman spinning in a descending maelstrom of a long festering feud. That works best.
However, there is a lot about The Devil to Pay that rests too comfortably on the standards and stereotype of the genre to set itself apart, including the role of Tommy, a woman who is the very definition of the clan leader archetype. Dressed in motherly aprons and cooking pies and biscuits, talking sweet, laced in charm, she drops threats of unthinkable pain with the kindly appeal of a grandma humming and spinning yarns about the good ol’ days. It’s not exactly a fresh approach, and it comes off all too distracting and hardly believable. Combine that with a string of hillbilly-esque movie has-beens including porch playing banjos and such and you get the feeling this isn’t looking to go somewhere new but rather play in the old.
Either way, the Ruckus’ keep the tempo steady, building the slow burn to its logical end well, concentrating more on the galvanizing character growth of Lemon rather than the violence she uncorks inside her, despite a few brutal moments of gore. It’s a tough balance to keep hold of, but it’s mostly held together right by Deadwyler’s earnest and often emotional performance. She soaks every ounce of the rough and ready Lemon in the mix and comes away with the best reason to watch.