Danielle Deadwyler adds emotional force to a bland script as a farmer who takes on a criminal family to protect her own
At times, this slow-burn indie hillbilly thriller feels like a heavy-footed stomp through the genre. It’s set in the Appalachian mountains, where a close-knit clannish community lives by its own rules; a lawless backcountry in which a lone woman takes on the meanest family on the mountain to protect her own, banjos strumming on the score. It’s not exactly strong on originality or authenticity. But what The Devil to Pay does have going for it is a performance of real emotional force by Danielle Deadwyler (best known for supporting roles in films such as the
Netflix western The Harder They Fall).
Deadwyler plays Lemon Cassidy, a farmer eking out a living with her husband and little boy. Life is tough, and gets tougher still when Lemon’s husband goes missing while up to his neck in trouble with the Runions – a terrifying local family headed up by matriarch Tommy (Catherine Dyer). We meet Tommy in her kitchen, all apple-pie sweetness and giving baking tips in the same breath as she threatens to kill Lemon’s son. As a character she’s a shade too gimmicky, or perhaps Dyer goes a bit light on the menace; either way Ma Runion never feels genuinely scary.