Ken Russell’s Horror-Drama ‘The Devils’ Hides An Overrated Sacrilegious Mess
(REVIEW) There is a kind of Christian who hates Christians and will love “Ken Russell’s The Devils.” I’m not one of them. That’s not to say Christians don’t sometimes give people good reason to dislike them, nor that every movie that validates people’s experiences of church hurt is bad.
Plenty of great movies, like “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” take church abuse and corruption seriously. But there is a type of person whose desire to see their issues with the church represented is so strong that movies that do so are graded on a steep curve. This is a movie made for such a person, because grading it on a curve is necessary to overlook what an absolute mess it is.
Based on true events and adapted from Aldous Huxley’s 1952 nonfiction book “The Devils of Loudun” and John Whiting’s 1961 stage adaptation, “Ken Russell’s The Devils” follows Urbain Grandier, a promiscuous Catholic priest who presides over the walled city of Loudun, where Catholics and Protestants live together in peace. Their self-governance poses a threat to Cardinal Richelieu’s authoritarian ambitions. So when the sexually repressed, hunchbacked nun Sister Jeanne accuses Grandier of demonic manipulation, Richelieu and other corrupt church authorities leap at the chance to depose him.
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The film was censored and condemned as sacrilegious when it was released in 1971. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert famously gave it a rare zero-star review. The censored footage was thought to be lost for decades, but was finally shown in 2004. The fully realized version of the film made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival this year before its theatrical rerelease on Oct. 16.
All this made “The Devils” a longtime cause célèbre among cinephiles. After all, a movie about religious oppression that was itself suppressed? What could be more fitting? But this metatextual context gives the movie more weight than it actually deserves. Strip that away, and you’re left with a film that has several major weaknesses and whose best qualities have already been explored more effectively in much better films.
The movie’s biggest artistic failure is that it keeps changing its mind about what kind of film it wants to be. “The Devils” starts with what will become its defining quality: a maximalist, over-the-top, “Rocky Horror Picture Show”-esque scene in which the king participates in a seminude pageant while a cardinal watches with apparent boredom. The cardinal then claims to enjoy the spectacle so he can propose an alliance that would make church and state in France absolute.
This kind of lavish, deliberately provocative dog-and-pony show receives most of the film’s cinematic attention. The movie builds around these spectacles as though they were its big musical numbers. Mass exorcisms feature nuns running around half-naked — and sometimes fully naked — while corrupt, fraudulent exorcists and doctors violate them in the church to “exorcise” them. The scenes shock us and make us feel the blasphemy these religious authorities are perpetrating. While this approach has both good and bad sides, which we’ll get to in a moment, it at least establishes a coherent aesthetic.
But the movie frequently interrupts these scenes with quieter character moments and arcs intended to give spiritual weight to these perversions. Here, the film utterly fails. Grandier is established as a priest who nobly stands up for the people of his city against the church and state authorities who want to take it over.
Yet he also seduces women, gets them pregnant and then dismisses them without a second thought. He eventually meets a woman he falls in love with and immediately turns his life around to marry her. He regrets the evil he has done and asks God to make him a better man.
This transformation is so rushed and contrived that you never really buy it. This is no “Becket.” Not least because Grandier never attempts to make restitution to those he has wronged. The film even portrays those he has wronged — particularly the women — as comically evil. This makes the character study, which is supposed to make us care about Grandier’s plight and contrast his personal piety with the church’s corruption, too muddled to be effectively untangled in the time the film gives it.
Then, on top of the maximalist profane satire and half-baked character drama, there’s a whole other movie of cringe-inducing ’70s camp that holds up only as something you might watch on RiffTrax or “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” One of the main characters is a sex-starved nun so horny that she imagines Grandier as Jesus and makes love to him in her imagination, only to falsely accuse him of possessing her when she discovers that he has secretly married another woman. Her scenes are so over-the-top and on the nose that whenever she appears onscreen, the movie becomes practically a cartoon.
These competing versions of the film do not mesh at all and distract from any genuine heart the movie is trying to convey. And there’s clearly heart here — even a deeply religious heart. The film is passionate about how genuine piety is often punished by those religious authorities who blaspheme Christ and the church through their exploitation of the weak and vulnerable in their care for the sake of power. It praises genuine religious piety in no uncertain terms.
The most important scene comes during a faux exorcism, when the film repeatedly cuts back and forth between the spectacle and Grandier’s private communion as he contemplates becoming a better man for God and others. The contrast between true holiness and its desecration is effective.
Other scenes have some of that power, too, such as the sequence in which Grandier is tortured and tried by his accusers but commits himself to God’s truth and prays for his enemies. The scene brings to mind other films of its kind, such as “A Man for All Seasons” and “The Passion of the Christ.”
Even here, the film’s greatest compliment is that it calls to mind better movies. It is incredibly proud of itself for paralleling the suffering of a true Christian at the hands of the church with the suffering of Christ, a comparison that “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” “Becket,” “A Man for All Seasons” and a dozen other films have already explored — and developed more fully. What this film brings to the table is making sure we see people naked while it does so. Once you see past the shock value, that adds very little.
Not only does it add very little, but it also makes the whole affair feel icky and hypocritical. In one scene, Grandier comes upon the blasphemous “exorcism” in the church, and the first thing he does is cover up a naked nun running around. It’s a sweet moment, and we see how his desire to clothe her is a genuinely pious and compassionate way to protect her dignity.
But if that’s true, what have we been doing all this time watching them parade around unclothed? And not just unclothed, but performing overt and sometimes outright pornographic acts? The film wants us to believe all of this is necessary to shock us with the evil of men corrupting holy things. And yet, while you can make an argument for some of it, much of it is gleeful excess that expresses a thrill in sacrilege — not just against the church, but against the women themselves.
The parade of scenes featuring naked nuns engaging in simulated sex acts with sacred objects in sacred spaces goes on long after it ceases to provoke any meaningful response. Eventually, it provokes little more than an eye roll. I’ve often argued that you can partly tell what a movie loves by what it spends time on. And this movie spends more time on scandal than on sincere spirituality.
There’s also an unsettling undercurrent of sexism and even misogyny in the movie. The vast majority of the women are nags, sex-starved lunatics or sheep who lack agency over their own appetites and desires. The only woman portrayed with dignity is the hero’s love interest. Most of the men are awful, sure, but they are portrayed as wicked men who stand upright. The film seems to revel in the humiliation — both self-inflicted and otherwise — of women who embody the most cringe-inducing stereotypes about their sex. Even the young woman Grandier gets pregnant is portrayed as shrill for wanting him to care for her and the child he fathered.
This brings an irony to the conversation. Defenders of the film accuse its detractors of failing to “see past” its pornographic surface to the pious message underneath. But an argument can be made for precisely the opposite. The film’s fans can’t see past its symbolic middle finger to the religious establishment to notice the pervy 13-year-old boy holding it up.
In the recent film “The Social Reckoning,” a Facebook whistleblower gets cold feet about her involvement in exposing the company’s corruption. In a heated moment, she lashes out and accuses her Wall Street Journal contact of being biased against tech because the industry is taking journalism jobs.
He pushes back: “My bias isn’t because tech is taking journalism jobs. It’s because you’re doing them so badly.”
Fans of “Ken Russell’s The Devils” will claim that those who dislike the film do so because they refuse to see past its obscenity to recognize the sacred film he was truly trying to make. But the truth is that most of what offends us is that he did it so badly.
“The Devils” is playing in theaters now.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.