Ken Russell's The Devils

An enduring masterpiece of cinema starring Academy Award winner Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed, KEN RUSSELL’S THE DEVILS is a prescient epic of obsession and corruption – and a defining work of art from seminal filmmaker Ken Russell.

Ken Russell’s 1971 The Devils remains one of cinema’s most transgressive and incendiary provocations, a feverish account of the Loudun possessions witchcraft trial in 17th-century France. Oliver Reed stars as Urbain Grandier, a wildly charismatic libertine priest who defies Cardinal Richelieu’s consolidation of power. Vanessa Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne is a sexually repressed, hunchbacked Abbess obsessed with Grandier with an intensity that ignites accusations of demonic possession among her convent’s nuns. Already a target for reprisals due to his political resistance, Grandier’s promiscuity eventually lands him on the wrong side of a powerful family.

Adapting from Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, Russell vividly stages the mass hysteria, torture, and exorcism as history, horror, and political allegory. Ken Russell's The Devils was infamously rated X, banned, censored, recut in many territories for decades, and is still controversial for its depictions of religious hysteria and its body horror. This director’s cut restores Russell’s original intent. Assembled from the original camera negative, this new 4K restoration presents Ken Russell’s definitive vision of The Devils by referencing the edit he privately constructed in 2004. Alternately hailed as a masterpiece and derided as pornography, its anti-authoritarian outrage and critique of institutional hypocrisy feel more urgent than ever.

Screening at Luna Leederville from October 29.

Festivals

2026 Toronto International Film Festival | Official Selection