Screening at Cannes: Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’

May 19, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Based in part on Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, Russell’s film, which scandalized audiences and censors around the world, uses 17th-century France as a vehicle for a ferocious indictment of church-and-state corruption. Courtesy Festival de Cannes and Warner Bros Clockwork.

“Satan is ever ready to seduce us with sensual delights—ahahahahaha!” sneers a horny nun in one of cinema’s most infamous antireligious screeds. In a muted first week at the Cannes Film Festival, where Hollywood opted not to premiere any big movies and the initial competition selections ranged from austere to demure, the hottest ticket on the Croisette was for a blasphemous film that first played theaters 55 years ago. And its arresting images of hysterical, orgiastic nuns watching as power-drunk priests sadistically interrogate their victims with torture-chamber glee are just as potent as ever. Get ready for torture-chamber tongue piercing, ankle hobbling and a burnt human femur used as a dildo.

The Devils, British filmmaker Ken Russell’s full-throated condemnation of rampant church-and-state corruption so brazenly risqué that its X-rated initial release was banned in some countries and censored in others, made its premiere this week in a completely uncut version handsomely restored in 4K from the original camera elements. The late director’s film maudit will be the initial title of newly founded Warner Bros. specialty label Clockwork, which will oversee its global release this October.

The period film, set in 17th-century France, received a single screening at Cannes that was so hotly anticipated that Oscar winners Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón (in town to kick off the festival) almost changed their travel plans to stick around. Peter Jackson, newly minted recipient of an honorary Palme d’Or at the opening ceremony, made sure to be there, in an auditorium where the majority of attendees shot up their hands when asked who was seeing the movie for the first time.

A wounded man wearing a crown of thorns stands bloodied in a crowd while a red-haired woman clings to him during a religious procession. — Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave in *The Devils*. Courtesy Festival de Cannes and Warner Bros Clockwork.

Starring a husky, hunky Oliver Reed as louche Father Urbain Grandier and a randy Vanessa Redgrave as the convent Abbess, demented hunchbacked Sister Jeanne des Anges, The Devils is partly based on Aldous Huxley’s 1952 historical narrative The Devils of Loudun. That book chronicles specious incidents of small-town demonic possession in plague-ridden 1634 after the defeat of the Protestants during the Huguenot rebellions, which Russell vividly recreates with righteous indignance. “The birth of a new France, where church and state are one,” says conniving Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) to a gleefully decadent King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage), right before they use their unfettered powers to cripple the prideful Grandier and his resistance to their consolidation of control over Loudun.

Grandier plants the seeds of his own destruction when he impregnates the latest in a string of convent lovers, this one a daughter from a powerful and well-connected family with a vengeful priest among her relatives. When the family’s shame dovetails with Richelieu’s political agenda, they trump up charges of Satanic control over the nuns, all due to an imagined unholy pact that Grandier supposedly made with the devil.

Sister Jeanne, already suffering from a lustful obsession with Grandier, is easily pushed over into temporary insanity after a rape-fueled exorcism, and her fellow nuns quickly follow her into delusions of carnal torment. One of the film’s most controversial scenes, long missing from circulated prints, involves the sex-starved naked sisters aggressively violating a larger-than-life effigy of a crucified Christ: licking its groin, grinding on its crotch and riding its face, while, from a distance, a blueballed priest watches and masturbates furiously to the orgiastic display.

Grandier initially epitomizes the church’s hierarchical perversions, even brazenly insisting that, in Hell, he will “walk on a living pavement of aborted bastards.” But his once-zestful embrace of “power, politics, riches and women” has left him yearning to embrace God through his love for a pure woman outside of the church—at which point The Devils ultimately turns into a tragedy in which the now-repentant Grandier faces unstoppable institutional depravity that inexorably leads to his downfall.

A large crowd dressed in black and white ceremonial garments gathers before a towering white cathedral filled with crosses and mourners. — The Devils will serve as the launch title for Clockwork, a newly founded Warner Bros. specialty label, when it receives its global release this October. Courtesy Festival de Cannes and Warner Bros Clockwork.

Introducing the Cannes premiere was historian Mark Kermode, who explained how he and Russell actually hunted down all the deleted material while making a 2004 documentary about this film and resolved themselves to reconstruct the director’s original version on a pre-HD format called digibeta, a standard-definition magnetic videotape—the source of a lo-res bootleg that has since made the rounds on illegal file-sharing services. But now, 22 years later, the principals at Clockwork were able to get Warner Bros. to open up their vaults and let them properly restore The Devils for posterity and eventual home video release.

“Ken always said, ‘This is my most—indeed, my only—political film,’” said Kermode. “He thought it was a film about brainwashing, he thought it was a film about the corruption of religion, and the unholy marriage of church and state, which is an even more important subject now than when Ken very prophetically made it in 1971. For a film this old to look this modern and this confrontational is extraordinary.”