What is a soul worth? If one believes that it’s not a thing that can be manifested on its own, that comes to us naturally, or that it is a gift instilled in us by our creator, well, that’s three different answers with three vastly different interpretations. In terms of divinity, the soul is priceless, the essence of self, and the thing that the Devil (Lucifer, Samael, the Lightbringer, etc.) prizes most of all. This, of course, is mostly due to the cultural influence of artwork like Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, but it has stuck and is where writer/director Brandon McCormick (John Henry and the Railroad) finds his starting point in his latest project, the Southern gothic action musical The Devil and the Daylong Brothers. McCormick manages to not only find harmony in what might seem like a discordant mix of genres, he provides a fully-formed world to explore that asks big questions about the soul, family, and redemption while looking straight into the dark parts of the American South.
The Daylong Brothers — Ishmael, Enoch, and Abraham (Brendan Bradley, Nican Robinson, and Jordon Bolden, respectively) — are on a spiritual mission. Not from G-d, like the wayward brothers of Chicago, but for a demonic accountant named Clarence (Mark Ashworth) with whom they’ve made a deal to collect the debts owed to the Devil in exchange for the whereabouts of their father, Nehemiah (Keith Carradine). If they find their father, they have a chance to get back their souls which that man traded before they were born for something he truly desired. With only a few more debtors to track down, the Daylong Brothers find themselves in a bit of a bind when their latest, Frankie (Rainey Qualley), not only has ties to the Brothers, but to Nehemiah himself, a tie she’s willing to work if it might save her skin. With their goal seemingly within their grasp, can the Brothers hold the line so that interlopers cannot break their bonds, or will the Devil get his due no matter what?
L-R: Jordon Bolden as Abraham, Nican Robinson as Enoch, and Brendan Bradley as Ishmael, and in THE DEVIL AND THE DAYLONG BROTHERS. Photo Credit: Jason Fobart. Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution.
McCormick’s script utilizes a fascinating blend of clarity and obscurity throughout. We understand the mission, we understand the stakes, and we understand the tone of Daylong Brothers within the very first scene as McCormick drops us straight into the action. The brothers find themselves in an altercation in a roadhouse, each one getting their own cell-shaded character intro card in the process making it quite clear who each of the brothers is, as well as providing a sense of their personality, as the action builds to its climax and their formal collective introduction. We’ve been given just enough information in this sequence to understand this world, its players, and what matters. McCormick doesn’t waste any time with unnecessary backstory or much exposition, resulting in a relatively quick pace throughout, but, this also means that the audience is expected to just accept what things are, as presented. Frankly, some mysteries are unnecessary to be explored or identified for this specific adventure (for instance, how did the three find each other?), while others better serve the story by creating a lore all their own (example: if we’re dealing with the damned, are there rules on how they age and, if not, does this mean that the Brothers could be from different eras of history?). The “face value” we, the audience, accept could, in actuality, be quite different within the realm of the narrative, though the answer isn’t as important to the events as they play out, even if they do add some delightful flavor to the discussion afterward.
Speaking of flavorful, audiences of a … certain age and appreciators of genre storytelling have many reasons to find themselves enamored with Daylong Brothers. Maybe they like a little Southern-style silliness, maybe tales of good vs. evil titillate, and maybe, just maybe, they enjoy when things get Supernatural. In the case of the latter, audiences will be immediately tickled to recognize that the Brothers are driving a 1958 Chevrolet Imperial (aptly nicknamed “Grace”), have it tricked out from remnants of their adventures in just about every crevasse, and that the eldest, Ishmael, is quite picky about who drives and manages it (though Grace, being amazing, has likely seen better days). There’s no argument over who picks the music, but the general vibe is going to feel familiar as the way that Bradley (Succubus), Robinson (Thunder Road), and Bolden (The Kill Room) engage each other (in both verbal and physical delivery) is with the intimacy of siblings. They speak over each other, they stand close, and they know what means the most and hurts the worst, thereby conveying that these three aren’t just bound by blood, but through countless debt collections we’ve yet to be privy to. Sharing a mission and a vehicle does create the kinds of close quarters that makes strangers into soldiers on a shared mission, even more so with sibling, yet we find ourselves immediately taken with these three characters by the way the actors make the brothers fully-realized so that small wounds (such as stealing the spotlight or blocking driving privileges) come across as the kinds of innocent needling that they are … at least until the Brothers break into song and truths come out.
With songs and score by producer (and frequent collaborator with McCormick) Nicholas Kirk (The Candy Shop), each Southern twinged poppy track enables the audience to get an inside look at what drives, compels, or punishes the characters within McCormick’s tale. The songs on their own tell a sorrowful tale of violence, rage, revenge, and a last stand against rising evil, each one adding to a harmonious energy that pulses through the film. However, “The Reckoning,” performed by Bolden and Qualley under her recording name “Rainsford,” may seem odd in the moment as the scene, the information it adds to this world, and the staging, slow things down quite a bit. That said, the blocking of the scene is quite powerful as Frankie indulges in multiple forms of torture at once, physical and psychological, as business becomes personal, and retribution looks quite different. By contrast, Robinson’s “I Been Wronged” allows Enoch, a character who sometimes struggles to find the right words (an aspect his brothers playful nudge him about) to express the pain he’s endured as a Black man in the southern states of the U.S., an aspect he pins entirely on his wayward father. Impressively, one of the best songs for narrative purposes may not even be the song that fans of Daylong Brothers put on repeat. The subtext of the character played by Carradine and his song “Burden, Lay Down” speaks to a wider issue of supposed racial superiority and cultural appropriation by the white community in the U.S. who take all they want and presume they can do it better than those who created it. If one believes in a forked-tongued devil, a swallower of souls, a prince of lies, then what better representation of a father figure than a man whose pride drove him to give up the innocence of his children without thought to the future or care for the outcome. If one looks past the delightful veneer of violence and song, McCormick’s Daylong Brothers truly is horrifying for the way it speaks to the twisted nature of humanity’s selfishness and the way it makes us all easy pickings for those smart enough to take advantage.
Where some may struggle with connecting with Daylong Brothers comes in Samuel Laubscher’s (Twenty) loose cinematography which tends toward a documentary-style capturing of the action and reliance on natural lighting. In the second action sequence of the tale, this translates to a pretty striking long-take that gives the scene an impulsive energy, a greater sense that anything can happen; however, this also makes the camerawork flowing in and out of intimate shots to midrange and back infuse the scene with a dizzying quality. By contrast, the portions with song are often far more controlled and traditional, illustrating an intentional separation and difference in visual language, one in which the audience must really lock in to in order to not become overwhelmed by it. Regarding the natural lighting, this supports that documentary-like authentic sensation, with characters and their environments as visible as their world allows. This choice helps ground the film amid all of its supernatural elements, anchoring it in the here-and-now, the corporeal world, reminding the audience that these characters exist in a realm that’s as real as our own. The downside being that there are a few scenes in which it’s difficult to make out facial expressions and other physical performance aspects as a side effect. That said, there’s one sequence involving the Brothers and Frankie where, even if the audience can predict the outcome, it is no less arresting in Labscher’s framing of it.
L-R: Nican Robinson as Enoch, Brendan Bradley as Ishmael, and Jordon Bolden as Abraham in THE DEVIL AND THE DAYLONG BROTHERS. Photo Credit: Jason Fobart. Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution.
There’s a repeated line, one that’s a defining characteristic of the Brothers, that shifts from declaration to important question: “We’re not murderers, we’re killers.” In their line of work, a delineation is formed to separate out those who kill for pleasure and those who do so out of need; it’s a demarcation that the three never seek to cross as they bring in those with blood debts come due. Amid song and blood, McCormick slowly brings this line forward, turning it into a question that not only involves the Brothers and their mission, but evokes the culpability of the audience themselves. Not only that, it brings us back to the initial question: what is your soul worth when it’s showered in blood, innocent or otherwise? Though McCormick ends Daylong Brothers on an upward note, there’s no denying the necessity of the question or its weight in the larger scheme of what the three faced in the narrative and what we face in the real world. For this world may be fiction, but it’s built on the back of real horrors which are being erased from record (unless there’s righteous pushback). But just because the history books or the schools willfully forget, doesn’t mean that the land does or that the people do. The fun of The Devil and the Daylong Brothers may end with the wrap of the credits or the close of a song via streamer, but the ideas within it play on.
In theaters, on VOD, and digital January 31st, 2025.
For more information, head either to the official The Devil and the Daylong Brothers Quiver Distribution webpage or film website.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, In Theaters, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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