The Cannes Classics sidebar is typically a mausoleum with good lighting—a place where elderly cinephiles pay respects to films whose reputations were settled decades ago. This year, however, the section is screening something that still has the power to clear a room: Ken Russell's The Devils, newly restored and as uncompromising as it was when it premiered in 1971 to walkouts, bans, and a Vatican condemnation that has never been rescinded.
The film, based on Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, depicts the 17th-century persecution of a French priest accused of witchcraft and demonic possession. What Russell made of this historical episode was not a sober period drama but a delirious, operatic assault on religious hypocrisy, political power, and the human capacity for cruelty dressed up as piety. Vanessa Redgrave plays a hunchbacked nun whose sexual obsession with Oliver Reed's charismatic Father Grandier becomes the pretext for his destruction. The imagery—nuns in orgiastic frenzy, a Christ figure violated, torture rendered in excruciating detail—has lost none of its capacity to disturb.
The cuts that never healed
Fifty-five years on, no complete version of The Devils has ever been officially released. Warner Bros., which financed the film, has kept the most extreme footage—the so-called "Rape of Christ" sequence—locked in its vaults. The restoration screening at Cannes is the most complete version available, but it is still not the film Russell made. This institutional squeamishness is itself part of the movie's legend: here is a work so transgressive that one of Hollywood's largest studios remains unwilling to let audiences see it whole.
Why provocation has become impossible
Contemporary cinema has no shortage of graphic content, yet nothing made today carries the same charge. The difference is intent. Russell was not interested in shock for its own sake; he wanted to implicate the audience in the mechanisms of persecution, to make the spectacle of cruelty unbearable rather than entertaining. Modern prestige horror and arthouse transgression tend to aestheticize their violence, inviting viewers to admire the craft. The Devils offers no such comfort. It is ugly, excessive, and sincere—qualities that have become almost unmarketable.
The film's relevance has also sharpened. In an era of resurgent authoritarianism and moral panics dressed in the language of protection, the story of a society destroying a man through manufactured hysteria feels less like history and more like diagnosis.
Our take
Screening The Devils at Cannes in 2026 is not mere nostalgia; it is a provocation aimed at the festival itself. Cannes loves to congratulate itself on championing difficult cinema, yet the industry it celebrates has become increasingly allergic to genuine risk. Russell's film asks an uncomfortable question: would any studio today finance a movie this unsparing, this contemptuous of audience comfort? The answer, almost certainly, is no. That The Devils still cannot be seen in its entirety is not a testament to its extremity—it is an indictment of our timidity.
