{"id":809809,"date":"2026-10-22T00:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T00:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/809809\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T00:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T00:48:09","slug":"ken-russells-the-devils-is-a-towering-monument-of-pure-filmmaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/809809\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’ Is a Towering Monument of Pure Filmmaking"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first\u00a0saw Warner Bros. Clockwork\u2019s stylish, strobe-light-heavy, fever-dream trailer announcing the 4K director\u2019s cut restoration of Ken Russell\u2019s The Devils<\/a>, I knew I had to see it on the big screen. Partly because I wanted to know how it earned its reputation as \u201cthe most controversial film ever made,\u201d a relic so elusive you had to spelunk through horror-collector back channels to find it.\u00a0 And honestly, I wondered whether it\u2019d add fuel to my ongoing lament that today\u2019s films are starved of the wild, pure artistry that defined the \u201970s<\/a>. After\u00a0seeing the film in 35mm at my beloved Music Box Theater in Chicago, I got far more than I bargained for:\u00a0The Devils is the most rousing,\u00a0grotesquely alive cinematic experience I\u2019ve seen all year.<\/p>\n

Based on Aldous Huxley\u2019s The Devils of Loudun, The Devils sees the secluded convent of Loudun in hysterics. At the epicenter of the hooplah is Father Urbain Grandier, the most attractive man alive, whose actor, Oliver Reed, quite literally has the widest chest I\u2019ve ever seen committed to film. The mustachioed priest has been accused of witchcraft. His accuser is Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), a sexually repressed, hunchbacked nun. Jeanne\u2019s parasocial obsession with Grandier, whom she\u2019s never met, serves as the perfect excuse for the corrupt members of the church to unite with Grandier\u2019s enemies to have him sentenced to death for bringing the devil into God\u2019s house. What follows is 114 minutes where humor and horror gnaw at the same bone: a barrage of campy satire that elbows the ribs of religious piety that\u2019s equal parts riotous and revolting.<\/p>\n

Call me vain and proud, the greatest sinner ever to walk God\u2019s earth, but Satan\u2019s boy I could never be. I haven\u2019t the humility. <\/p>\n

Despite the trailer making me think I was in for a grimdark, feel-bad movie experience, The Devils felt more like watching an NC-17 Monty Python film than the pearl-clutching affair it was talked up as. Point being: there\u2019s a scene where Grandier parries a sword with a taxidermied crocodile. The Devils is effortlessly funny. Viewed through a modern lens, Reed\u2019s portrayal of Grandier is tantamount to Ian McShane pulling off Matt Berry\u2019s Laszlo Cravensworth from What We Do in the Shadows. That\u2019s not to say the film doesn\u2019t take itself seriously, with on-the-nose call-outs of religious hypocrisy running through its dizzying two-hour runtime.\u00a0The last 30 minutes might be the most distressing and repulsive climax I\u2019ve seen since Park Chan-wook\u2019s Oldboy and Kim Jee-woon\u2019s I Saw the Devil.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Having been raised Lutheran, I\u2019m a degree removed from the Catholic\u2011targeted outrage that kept Russell\u2019s film buried for decades. But watching it now, as a millennial in 2026, the film\u2019s fury and lampooning of how institutions manufacture outsiders as convenient pariahs to mask their own corruption feels startlingly prescient. Father Grandier is a textbook example of an imperfect perpetrator. He\u2019s a womanizer with a liberal definition of a priest\u2019s religious gray zone to make the beast with two backs so long as love, with the fleeting thought of marriage, is on his mind\u2026 eventually.<\/p>\n

From Ken Russell\u2019s script to Oliver Reed\u2019s performance: a side-by-side comparison with continuity supervisor Ann Skinner\u2019s original script. <\/p>\n

KEN RUSSELL\u2019S THE DEVILS opens in theaters 10.16 for one week only: https:\/\/t.co\/RP4YhCOsxW<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/7g1eaxzxcL<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Warner Bros. Clockwork (@clockwork_wb) October 6, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

While it\u2019s old hat by today\u2019s standards for a pious man to use the \u201cdo as I say, not as I do\u201d excuse, portrayals of religious hypocrisy and the gray zones within them have never felt as novel as in The Devils. While his enemies seek a coerced confession out of Grandier, Jeanne and the nuns of Loudun deploy phrases and words like demonic possession and exorcism, giving the impression that the film dips into the supernatural, but that couldn\u2019t be further from the case. They\u2019re buzzwords the corrupt cardinal leverages with the general public to excuse their crusade. The film goes so far as to slap its title card across the faces of Graham Armitage\u2019s daffy King Louis XIII and Christopher Logue\u2019s politicking Cardinal Richelieu, making it painfully obvious that church and state are the real devils at work. In today\u2019s world, Grandier\u2019s only crime is that he was so sexy the world wanted him dead.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just Grandier\u2019s enemies who take advantage of his satanic-panic farce of a trial. The nuns of Loudun, following Jeanne\u2019s example, use the guise of Grandier\u2019s prosecution as an excuse to indulge their sexual perversions, claiming to be possessed by the devil, transforming the satirical film into a transgressive artifact of filmmaking at its most manic.<\/p>\n

I love every inch of The Devils. Every line drips with witty, endlessly quotable dialogue that holds up in any era. My favorites are Grandier\u2019s line to Jeanne, saying, \u201cAnything found in the desert of a frustrated life can bring hope,\u201d and Jeanne\u2019s own HBIC line, \u201cThey say they can stand up to the Church, but they can\u2019t stand up to this bitch!\u201d<\/p>\n

Likewise, The Devils\u2018 tone is a smooth ebb and flow of graphic imagery and comedic cutaways that had me recoil one moment and belly-laugh the next. I\u2019d even go so far as to say Ken Russell\u2019s staging and framing rival David Lynch and Akira Kurosawa\u2019s cinematography.\u00a0But most of all, the incomparable Derek Jarman\u2019s impeccable set design makes every frame of The Devils feel like an anachronistic work of art.\u00a0Though its era feels very much old world, The Devils\u2018 set design still feels wholly new, and at times, downright otherworldly<\/a>, despite being a film from the \u201970s. Unlike films of today, The Devils is lush with deep, saturated colors. Even at its most muted, Jarman\u2019s set designs, placed against a creamy blue sky, make me mourn how many contemporary films are shot on a sound stage or with green screen. The Devils is a sacrament to artistry, with teeth in both its script and its craftsmanship.<\/p>\n

Sin can be caught as easily as the plague. See how the one and only Michael Gothard transformed Father Barr\u00e9 from script to screen. <\/p>\n

KEN RUSSELL\u2019S THE DEVILS is now playing in theaters: https:\/\/t.co\/RP4YhCOsxW<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/AJbpxc7cgZ<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Warner Bros. Clockwork (@clockwork_wb) October 19, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

Everyone in The Devils is giving it their all. Reed\u2019s portrayal of Grandier is both a laugh-out-loud riot and enormously tragic. Redgrave\u2019s sardonic and contemptible performance as the delusional Sister Jeanne is nothing short of iconic. Side characters like Armitage\u2019s King Louis XIII and Murray Melvin\u2019s sniveling Mignon guarantee a laugh, whether through their sheer screen presence or comedic snap zooms. While Reed and Redgrave chew the scenery throughout the film, Michael Gothard\u2019s scene-stealing performance as Pierre Barr\u00e9 was hands down my favorite. Gothard\u2019s sniveling Barr\u00e9 making up shit as he goes is the closest thing 17th-century France has to a manosphere influencer moonlighting as a youth pastor. I love his cunty John Lennon glasses. I love his smarmy grimace; I love his holier-than-thou gait. And he\u2019s arguably the worst man in the film. If anything, that\u2019s a testament to how great the film is that even its most contemptible characters shine through as guilty favorites. (Though I\u2019m sure he was a prime example of why the film was locked away for decades.) Thankfully, I\u2019m not the only person reveling in The Devils seeing the light of day once again on the silver screen.<\/p>\n

Evidently, the film\u2019s theatrical rerelease did so well that its run has been extended an extra week by popular demand<\/a>, and I couldn\u2019t be happier. The Devils\u2018 rerelease has meant the world to me, as someone who only just discovered it through the renewed water-cooler conversations and memes it\u2019s generated online. Key among folks\u2019 discoveries is the baffling cameo Sister Jeanne had alongside Clockwork Orange\u2018s criminals in Space Jam 2<\/a>. My favorite example of the film\u2019s resurgence is a stylish edit someone posted on X\/Twitter cutting the movie into a similar strobe-light effect to Nine Inch Nails<\/a>\u2018 \u201cCloser.\u201d As a fan of NIN, I look forward to seeing an edit to the arguably more appropriate song, \u201cHeresy,\u201d in the near future.<\/p>\n

ok fuck it the devils 1971 closer nine inch nails edit flash warning oliver reed vanessa redgrave excellence pic.twitter.com\/oYqyBd063Z<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Esme \ud83d\ude35 (@irltechnogatsby) October 17, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

Although The Devils has been elusive in horror circles, its influence has lived on in the imagery of modern classics.\u00a0Key among them are Robert Eggers\u2019 films\u00a0Nosferatu,\u00a0The Northman, and Werwulf. Eggers himself thinks he and Russell are kindred spirits<\/a>. Had Warner Bros. Clockwork not rereleased The Devils, it would\u2019ve taken me much longer to discover and become such a huge fan of Reed, Redgrave, and Russell. I\u2019m so enamored with the film, I\u2019ve made it a point to check out their filmographies and fall in love with their other work.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a week out from seeing Ken Russell\u2019s The Devils, and the film still has me on a high I haven\u2019t gotten over. It\u2019s gotten to the point that I\u2019m actively making excuses to experience it again, vicariously through my friends, by dragging them to the theater with me. In a world where blockbuster movies spin the block with theatrical rereleases to massage their box office numbers<\/a>, I hope The Devils ushers in an era where more gems forgotten\u2014on purpose or otherwise\u2014can be experienced by a younger generation of moviegoers like myself. Though I\u2019ll settle for a Blu-ray release.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows<\/a> to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books<\/a> that should be on your radar.<\/p>\n