Ken Russell’s The Devils Review: The Sacred and the Profane

I: Ecstasy

Film enthusiasts around the world have been waiting like zealots anticipating Judgment Day since it was announced that Warner Bros. Clockwork division would be rereleasing The Devils. Not simply that it was a chance to see British iconoclast Ken Russell’s subversive masterpiece, but the full, purposefully obscene and provocative original cut, in all its forthright glory.

Blending elements of Aldous Huxley’s 1952 novel, The Devils of Loudon, and John Whiting’s 1960 play, The Devils, Russell uses the true story of a 17th century witch hunt to eviscerate the hypocrisy, malevolence, and madness that results when faith and politics intertwine. Even though the film is set in southeastern France, Russell’s script is rooted across the English Channel in the dynamic degeneracy of the Jacobean tragedy, a period whose defining trait was an intellectual and moral lawlessness. In the wake of the French Religious Wars, only the city of Loudun remains intact. Its Catholic and Huguenot populations peacefully co-exist, much to the joy of the popular and charismatic Father Grandier (Oliver Reed) and the ire in Paris of Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue). Grandier, brooding and erudite, stands in the way of his plans to make the supremacy of the Holy See – and therefore his own power – absolute. An opportunity is afforded to him by a seeming demonic infestation at the city’s Ursuline convent under Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), who blames the lustful ways of Grandier.

Ecstasy brings doom. Grandier is too fixated on his carnal appetites to see how his arrogance is damning both him and the city he loves. But when even the nuns openly lust after him, who can quite blame him? Yet it’s in Sister Jeanne’s confusion between her religious and physical ecstasies – summed up in two dream sequences that are both devotional and deviant – that Russell unabashedly confronts some of the more bizarre elements of Christian symbolism. Let’s just say that his purposeful misreading of the passion bit of Passion of the Christ becomes a deliciously twisted double entendre.

II: Blasphemy

Of course, Russell’s intention throughout his career was transgression, and The Devils is unapologetically and creatively crude. As the nuns, finally unleashed from the strictures of their order, tear down the crucifix and mount the naked Christ, Russell’s full-bore assault on the cardboard institutions of faith is clear. He even makes that Jesus deliberately ugly and amateurish, a stark contrast to the beautiful classical statues that Grandier keeps in his quarters.

But Russell was too cerebral a filmmaker to think he could rely on mere shock tactics, and The Devils’ heterodoxy is grounded in real theology. In Reed he found that perfect combination of the profane and the sublime. Through this avatar, he was able to not only explain the gaping chasms between text and dogma, but to make Grandier’s path to a meaningful redemption feel real. The heretic becomes the pious man, penitent for his own sins and therefore unwilling to give himself succor through false confession. The swaggering, bejeweled version that Reed initially portrays is stripped of everything that made the women swoon and yet becomes more charismatic. 

III: Revelations 

Russell’s work has been more discussed than actually seen in the last few decades, and now its return to theatres reveals it in its true, transcendent glory. The barely restrained chaos of Russell’s direction feels like someone handed Hieronymus Bosch a camera, filled with monstrous and warped creatures crafted by British character actors like Michael Gothard as rock star exorcist Father Pierre Barre and Dudley Sutton as Richelieu’s cunning enforcer, the Baron de Laubardemont. Yet that carnage is counterbalanced by the sumptuous grandeur of the set of fellow visual genius and future filmmaker Derek Jarman. His version of Loudon, a gigantic set of white brick and stark lines centered around the monumental cathedral, feels historic and yet contemporary. Meanwhile the sumptuous period costume designs by Russell’s wife, Shirley, never distance the viewer from the immediacy of the story. And if anyone knew how to swirl a cassock to captivate the camera, it was Reed. 

Yet this is also Julie Christie’s film as the cruel fabulist who lets an entire city burn because she cannot quench her own desires. She stands in counterpoint to Reed’s lusty performance, and to Russell’s ultimately romantic view of a fulfilling physical relationship, just as Grandier’s true faith highlights the fundamentalist hypocrisies of Richelieu’s corrupt minions. Her carnality and sanctimony stand in cruel juxtaposition to Gemma Jones’ deeply sweet and tragic performance as Madeleine de Brou, the woman whose love provides Grandier with spiritual redemption yet leads to his corporeal destruction.

The main characters almost never cross paths: Indeed, Grandier has never even met Sister Jeanne, whose diabolical lusts and fixation upon him are utterly one-sided. Russell never presents a grand showdown, as his narrative is about the use and abuse of power, and especially the interactions between church and state. That Redgrave and Reed perform such a compulsive duet without ever sharing a single frame is a testament to their incredible power.

IV: Redemption 

It may not be divine intervention, but it definitely seems fortuitous timing that this uncut, unrated, and sumptuously restored version of The Devils is being unleashed as theocracy rises in America. Russell’s reduction of the crowd to a jeering mass, repeating whatever was said last and cavorting to their own destruction, seems disturbingly prescient, but maybe that’s because that’s the way it’s always been. And what’s all the more terrifying is that this is all based on real history. Let us all pray that it doesn’t follow its terrible habit of repeating itself.

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This article appears in October 16 • 2026.