The Devils opens with Louis XIII performing a court masque as a white-feathered Venus rising from the sea — a scene so gilded and bizarre it feels like the entire film announcing its method: beauty deployed as a mask for violence, spectacle as the instrument of state. This is not a film that eases you in. Peter Maxwell Davies's dissonant, crazed score arrives within minutes and never quite lets go, and you understand immediately that Ken Russell is not making a historical drama. He is making a diagnosis. Oliver Reed's Father Grandier is one of the great underrated performances in British cinema. The role asks him to be simultaneously a hypocrite, a saint, a sensualist, and a martyr — and Reed holds all of it without flinching, giving Grandier the careless dignity of a man who knows he's more interesting than the people trying to destroy him. His line about Satan — 'I could never be Satan's boy. I haven't the humility' — lands as comedy, then revelation, then epitaph. It is the film in miniature. Vanessa Redgrave as Sister Jeanne Des Anges is the more difficult performance, and the more remarkable one. Russell asks her to play sexual obsession, institutional power, and self-deceiving cruelty simultaneously, and she delivers something radioactive — a portrayal that makes you uncomfortable in ways the film clearly intends, and some ways it perhaps doesn't fully account for. The Guardian's reviewer notes the film's own complicity in the centuries-long misogyny around Jeanne's 'deformity,' now visible in a way it wasn't in 1971. That self-critique is honest and worth sitting with. Derek Jarman's set design deserves the word 'extraordinary' in its literal sense: the white-tiled nunnery with its low arched ceilings (forcing everyone to stoop, an architectural metaphor so blunt it shouldn't work and absolutely does), the multi-storey library that reads simultaneously as jailhouse and baroque cathedral, the great walls of Loudun that echo Kubrick's housing estate in A Clockwork Orange — made the same year, a coincidence that feels too meaningful to be coincidence. These two films are holding a conversation about authority, violence, and the body, and watching them as a pair is a genuine education. What the restoration clarifies — what the cuts obscured — is the film's central argument, which is not about sex or religion but about the mechanics of political suppression. Cardinal Richelieu needs Loudun's walls demolished; Grandier won't permit it; the demonic possession of the nuns is the instrument chosen to destroy him. Russell is precise about this. The 'devils' are not real — not in the sense the Church holds them to be — and the authorities know it. The hysteria is manufactured, or at minimum cynically accelerated once it begins. The comparison to Friedkin's The Exorcist, made two years later, is sharp: Friedkin offered authentic possession whose horror was real; Russell offers performed possession whose horror is that everyone in power is performing along with it. The film sits alongside Visconti's The Damned, Cavani's The Night Porter, and Pasolini's Salò as part of a cluster of 1970s European films asking the same question: how does fascism recruit sexuality into its project? Russell's answer is specific and clinical — power licenses decadence as a pressure valve, then turns that same decadence into the pretext for crackdown. The cycle is the point. The displaced sexuality of the persecutors is not incidental detail; it is the mechanism. Tyranny and repression are presented as the same impulse wearing different costumes. After 50 years of censorship and partial releases, The Devils in complete form is not a comfortable watch — it was never meant to be. It is, as the review's final image suggests, an aria: structured, formal, building to a scorched conclusion. What remains when the fever breaks is a landscape that looks like the aftermath of plague. Russell earned that ending. So did Grandier.
