By Kat Guevara, Contributing Writer
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 10/14/2026
In the late Ken Russell’s The Devils, the line between fantasy and blasphemy disappears. Religious hysteria, masked townspeople and death dressed in powder white come together in a chaotic mix of striking contrasts. Everything becomes a performance, from the control of the convent to the public spectacle of punishment. Yet beneath the extravagance of 17th-century France lies a timeless tragedy of the individual against the state, where survival is a struggle and people lose control over their own bodies and lives.
Set during the Loudun possessions of 1634, Russell draws from Aldous Huxley’s 1952 book The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s stage adaptation. The film follows the libertine Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), a Catholic priest whose independence threatens Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue), who seeks to strengthen the power of King Louis XIII over France. As the town of Loudun fights to maintain its independence, Grandier becomes a scapegoat for political ambitions disguised as religious salvation.
The film moves like an orchestra, its rhythm shaped by centered, confrontational compositions and low angle shots that lend its figures as monuments and standalone relics. Sometimes comedic. Russell contrasts pastoral serenity with Loudun’s religious hysteria. Grandier breaks bread with his secret wife Madeleine de Brou (Gemma Jones) against a minimalist mountainscape, while the convent becomes a theater of repression and desire. Early on, a costumed blackbird, evoking Protestantism, is shot for sport, foreshadowing the violence to come.
Grandier’s trial unfolds as a grotesque cabaret, transforming persecution into entertainment and religious fervor into a means of manufacturing consent. The alleged sinner emerges as a martyr. Meanwhile, those claiming righteousness expose their own corruption.
Released in 1971, the same year Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs premiered, The Devils belongs to an era of cinema confronting institutional violence and sexual repression. Its feverish religious imagery anticipates Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness (1973) and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973), though Russell’s particular achievement lies in making spectacle inseparable from the exercise of power.
Long withheld from audiences in its fullest form due to censorship during its era, the restored and intended cut by the director remains as provocative as the institutions it scrutinizes. Russell’s The Devils is returning to Los Angeles theaters starting Oct. 15 across select theaters.
Photos provided by Warner Bros Ent.
