Controversial ’70s film still packs a potent power to shock
The Devils
Starring Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave & Gemma Jones
Directed by Ken Russell
Rated NC-17
In theaters Friday, Oct. 16, 2026
One of the most controversial movies of all time is coming back into theaters again.
Director Ken Russell’s The Devils, originally released in 1971, returns to the big screen for an extremely limited run of one week. If you happened to miss all the hand-wringing and moral outrage more than half a century ago, well, now you’ve got another chance.
The film has been newly remastered, posthumously spiffed up and restored as a “director’s cut,” with scenes that had previously been excised, banned or censored. Based on actual events that occurred in 17th century France, it stars Oliver Reed as a rebellious libertine priest, Father Grandier, and Vanessa Redgrave as sister Jeanne, the sexually repressed humpbacked abbess at an Ursuline convent in the fortified commune of Loudun.
Grandier, no stranger to pleasures of the flesh, is a heavenly hunk. The cloistered nuns literally swoon at the sight of him; Jeanne pleasures herself and has fevered fetishistic fantasies, imagining Grandier as Christ, coming down from the cross for her to sensually kiss his wounds before they make love in the Golgotha dirt. The collective longings eventually build into a sexual frenzy, whipped into an orgiastic whirlwind when a priest (Michael Gothard) accuses the nuns of demonic possession—and Jeanne, under extreme duress, whispers Grandier’s name. The celibacy-flaunting Grandier’s an easy target; he’s already married a young wannabe sister (Gemma Jones) and knocked up a nobleman’s daughter (Georgina Hale). He’s accused of heresy, inciting demonic possession, and sentenced to be burned at the stake.
It all takes place against a backdrop of French politics, rebellion and a power-grab plan of King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) to eradicate Huguenot Protestants from his realm. The king wants to bring down Loudun’s fortified walls to prevent the town from becoming a Protestant stronghold.
Director Russell, who died in 2011, was known as a flamboyant filmmaker who reveled in the grandiose excesses of cinematic possibilities, and he pulled out all the stops for The Devils, originally rated X but heavily redacted to get an R rating for re-release in 1979. It’s easy to understand how, back in the ‘70s, even people who hadn’t seen it were outraged—and titillated—by what they heard about it. It was labeled as blasphemous, profane, sexually obscene and audaciously sacrilegious, with scenes of female nudity (naked nuns!), self-flagellation, masturbation, candlesticks treated as phallic substitutes, and wrenching torture—and the unmistakable suggestion that religious zealotry and hyper-repressed sexuality were at the root of it all.
Fifty years later, The Devils has lost none of its shock value—most notably in one scene that has been fully restored, when the naked nuns pull down a bigger-than-life-size sculpture of Jesus from the altar and begin, well, grinding all over it. That scene is called, suggestively enough, “The Rape of Christ.”
The new restoration makes itself noticed with another little detail. Back in the ‘70s, watching the movie unspool from grainy 35mm film, it was easy to miss the now well-defined bikini tan lines on some of the actresses. As Shakespeare might have said, get thee to a nunnery…when you get off the beach.
And it’s timely anew, almost preternaturally. When Grandier finally meets his fate in front of a cheering, jeering crowd, it’s impossible to forget the recent announcement from the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, calling for a return to the savagery of barbaric public executions, livestreamed for all to see.
And when Grandier ask his accusers how they can’t see that “the will of one man can be pushed to destroying a man, a city or a nation,” it’s impossible to miss the movie’s timely message cutting through the lavish luridness loud and clear: When wielded together, religious hysteria and unchecked political power can be a dangerous—and devilish—combination, a toxic marriage of church and state, no matter the time or the place.
—Neil Pond