The Devils

• Ken Russell's actual director's cut ran 117 minutes and included the notorious 'Rape of Christ' sequence (nuns violating a statue of Christ), but Warner Bros. cut that scene entirely before the film was ever submitted to the BBFC. The theatrical UK version that received an X certificate ran 111 minutes; the US release was trimmed further, to 108 minutes.
• The uncut director's cut has never had an official release. Even the BFI's 2012 UK DVD used the censored 111-minute theatrical cut, not the full version. A newly restored, fully uncut 4K version finally premiered at Cannes Classics in May 2026 -- more than 50 years after the film was shot -- ahead of a limited October 2026 theatrical run.
• Derek Jarman, later a major arthouse director in his own right (Caravaggio, Blue), served as production designer, spending months devising the film's stark white-tiled city and convent sets -- a knowing homage to public restrooms lifted from Aldous Huxley's source material.
• The film was banned outright in Italy following Vatican condemnation and pulled from Ireland's original theatrical release; in the US it received an X rating that severely limited its distribution despite strong reviews in some quarters.
• The screenplay is drawn from Aldous Huxley's 1952 nonfiction book The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting's 1960 stage adaptation of it.

Sister Jeanne's possession isn't supernatural—it's a weaponized breakdown. Russell frames her 'exorcism' scenes with such clinical distance that the demons read as mass psychogenic illness, politically directed. The real exorcist is Richelieu, and the real demon is the state.

Grandier is a Christ figure Russell knowingly corrupts. The burning scene inverts martyrdom iconography: Grandier dies for a city that doesn't want saving, betrayed by a flock he genuinely loved. His refusal to repent makes him more saintly than any priest in the film, but Russell refuses to let him be pure—he's a sexual predator who weaponized confession. The film argues sainthood and corruption can't be separated.

The white cathedral sets aren't just aesthetic—they're the thesis. By stripping Gothic grandeur from the church, Russell argues the institution's power was always bureaucratic, never mystical. The demons are theater, the exorcisms are pornography, and religion is the state's most efficient tool for making spectacle out of punishment.

Cardinal Richelieu wants Loudun's city walls torn down, but Father Grandier—the town's libertine priest with a taste for power and women—refuses to let the fortified town fall, standing in the way of Richelieu's plan to strip France's walled towns (long tied to Huguenot/Protestant refuge rights) of their defenses. When Sister Jeanne, a hunchbacked nun consumed by sexual obsession for Grandier, gets rejected, Richelieu's agents weaponize her hysteria into a full-blown possession epidemic. What follows is a state-engineered exorcism circus: nuns stripped, violated with holy instruments, and forced to perform for paying audiences. Grandier is burned alive while the crowd watches, and as he burns, the city walls are blown up behind him. Russell's most dangerous film says the demons were always political.