Every so often a film slips through the cultural net because its early notices are lukewarm, or because it arrives with the wrong packaging. The Devil Has a Name, which premiered in 2019, is one of those stealthy surprises: a ragged, righteously angry, unexpectedly funny environmental drama that I might have ignored had I paid attention to the consensus. I’m glad I didn’t. It’s a small miracle of nerve and verve—messy in places, yes, but propelled by a moral clarity and an old-fashioned crowd-pleasing spirit that’s hard to resist.
Directed by Edward James Olmos, the film dramatises a familiar David-versus-Goliath story: a stubborn, ageing farmer in California’s Central Valley discovers his groundwater has been poisoned and decides to drag a mighty oil conglomerate into the light. That set-up invites easy comparisons—Erin Brockovich, Dark Waters, the great American tradition of muckraking courtroom dramas—but Olmos aims for something stranger and more combustible. He blends the earnestness of a procedural with a streak of pitch-black humour and a faint whiff of frontier mythmaking. This isn’t a sober white-paper movie so much as a campfire tale told with a grin and a raised eyebrow, and it’s all the better for the personality.
It’s an American dark comedy film starring and directed by Edward James Olmos. It also stars David Strathairn, Kate Bosworth, Pablo Schreiber, Martin Sheen with Edwards James Olmos as Santiago and supporting stars like Alfred Molina, Haley Joel Osment and Kathleen Quinlan.
Fred Stern, a widower, played by David Strathairn discovers that his farmland is damaged after being exposed to harmful chemicals let out by an oil company. He then challenges Gigi Cutler, Kate Bosworth, the snotty head of a powerful oil association.
The movie was poorly rated on both IMDB 36% with only 25 reviews and on IMDB 5.5 out of 10 just showing you can’t rely on what other people say to determine whether you watch a film or not. I think it’s probably because the synopsis doesn’t exactly give the correct impression as to what the movie is like or about. I didn’t find the matriarchal oil boss, Gigi Cutler to be psychotic I thought she was brutal yes but totally calculated and in control even when slugging whiskey from a hip flask.
I ignored the reviews and decided to trust an epic cast who clearly trusted the director (American me 1992 and HBO’s Walkout which earned him a directors guild of America nomination) and co star of the movie based on true events, another draw for me.
It is billed as a comedy, a black comedy at that, it didn’t make me belly laugh although there was definitely humour in the script in a Tarantino, Kill Bill or Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone kind of way. Except not so violent it’s a court room drama that tells the story of Shore Oil and Gas company’s cover up of dumping poisonous spill off on central California farmers land over 10 years and the legal battle that followed. The film covers themes of Corporate pollution, environmental destruction, the power of big business, and fighting for justice within a small time, Texan stereotypical frame work of misogyny, Stetson hats, tobacco chewing, cowboy boot wearing, bolo tie pinching, whiskey slugging back drop, Kate Bosworth included, the only person missing was Matthew Mcconahey, Lincoln Lawyer.
If you liked Dark Waters, a fantastic film and Erin Brockovich, starring the magnificent Oscar winning Julia Roberts this is one to watch for sure.
The Devil Has a Name (2019): the unexpectedly great film I’d have missed if I’d listened to the reviews
It helps that the film understands the land at its heart. You can almost taste the dust kicked up in orchards, feel the brittle anxiety of a drought-stricken economy, and sense how a farm becomes an extension of a person’s spine—what keeps them standing when everything else feels precarious. That embodied connection to place is what puts teeth in the story’s ethics: corporate malfeasance is not an abstract harm here; it’s the slow theft of a community’s future. When the film gets mad, it feels earned.
Much of the joy comes from the ensemble’s crackle. There’s a veteran lead whose flinty warmth makes the farmer’s stubbornness endearing rather than merely obstinate; he’s the sort of actor who can make silence feel like a rebuttal. Across the aisle sits a gallery of corporate operatives, some venal, some conflicted, all recognisably human even when their choices curdle into cruelty. The roles are sketched in bold strokes—one executive is almost comically ruthless, another a company lifer in denial—but the actors locate glimmers of doubt, pride and fear beneath the archetypes. That mix of caricature and nuance is emblematic of the film’s tonal gamble: it wants you to laugh at the absurdity of power while never letting you forget the stakes.
Olmos’s direction is unfussy but energetic. He keeps the camera where it can see people think—boardrooms, kitchen tables, the liminal spaces outside courtrooms where decisions are really made. When the film lunges into satire, he lets the frames breathe; when it tenses into a legal sparring match, the cuts tighten and the score nudges you forward. There are flourishes—a devilish recurring motif, a few punchline reveals—that might feel too theatrical for those who prefer their social drama with a strictly naturalistic finish. For me, those touches are exactly what lift the material: you feel the storyteller’s hand, and the storytelling is witty.
Why, then, did so many critics shrug? Some of the reasons are easy enough to see. The tonal seesaw is real. In one scene, you’re watching a heartfelt funeral for a way of life; in the next, you’re confronted with a suit delivering a monologue so nakedly villainous it edges on comic-book territory. A few speeches lay out the themes with billboard clarity. There’s at least one character who seems to have stumbled in from a satire two shades darker than the rest of the film. If you demand polish and tonal purity, you’ll notice the rough edges.
But those edges are part of the charm. The film’s broadness is purposeful: the system is absurd, so the film lets itself be absurd in return. Its moral is not complicated, and that’s okay. We’re living through an era when water is literally on fire in places, when companies pay fines they treat as routine overheads for poisoning people they’ll never meet. Subtlety has its place; so does a punchy fable with jokes sharp enough to draw blood. The Devil Has a Name works because it marries indignation to entertainment. It trusts that audiences can handle a wink and a gut-punch in the same reel.
There’s also a thread of melancholy braided through the swagger. The farmer’s crusade isn’t only about vengeance; it’s about dignity, grief and the terror of being made small by forces you can’t see. The film lingers on the cost of stubbornness—the relationships strained, the finances wrecked—and it never pretends that a courtroom victory, if it comes, will reset the world. That honesty keeps the finale from becoming empty triumphalism. Justice here feels like an act of resistance, not a guarantee.
Craft-wise, the film is better than its reputation suggests. The sound design is tactile—machinery, wind, the quiet of a home when a life partner is gone. The cinematography trades in contrasts: hot, dusty light in the fields; cool, antiseptic blues in corporate spaces; the warm shadows of bars and backrooms where deals are mooted and morale is fortified. The pacing rarely drags. Even when a subplot threatens to sprawl, the momentum returns quickly, usually on the back of a tart exchange or a new revelation about who’s bankrolling whom.
Perhaps the most satisfying surprise is how contemporary it feels without chasing the headlines. It captures the way corporate responsibility has been gamified into PR metrics, how legal settlements become line items, how loyalty is rewarded until it isn’t. Yet it also believes in people—the stubborn neighbour who shows up with a spanner, the mid-level employee who realises their moral injury too late, the outmatched lawyer who finds their backbone because someone else refuses to sit down. That blend of cynicism about systems and faith in individuals is old-fashioned, but it’s not naïve; it’s the fuel for change.
If online chatter told you to skip The Devil Has a Name, I’d encourage you to ignore it. It’s not perfect. It’s not tidy. It is, however, alive—funny, furious, humane and oddly hopeful. It made me laugh at how cartoonish power can be, then clench my jaw at how real its consequences are. And it reminded me why we keep taking chances on films that don’t arrive with a victory parade of plaudits: because sometimes the stories that matter most are the ones that sound a bit too loud, a bit too strange, and absolutely, gloriously, like they mean it.