Typically, the Cannes Classics section is not one of the festival’s major noise-makers. Mostly comprising restorations of classic titles and new documentaries about film history, it is, for most attendees who don’t specifically work in repertory cinema, a place to take a breather, to dip into the pleasures of the old amid the whirling rush of the new, at least if your schedule permits. Rarely is a Cannes Classics screening the hot ticket of the festival. But so it was in the early days of this year’s edition, as securing a place at the Thursday night unveiling of a new 4K restoration of “The Devils” — British auteur Ken Russell‘s incendiary 1971 imagining of the 17th-century Loudun possessions — became a critical challenge.
I got lucky. The festival’s ticketing system provided as soon as booking opened four days prior. Many others did not. Cue a lot of messages from friends and colleagues politely enquiring whether I was definitely planning to use that ticket — yes, sorry, I was — and publicists checking in to see if their ticket-wrangling skills were needed. The day of the screening, hopefuls repeatedly, feverishly refreshed the booking page, waiting for last-minute returns; outside the festival’s Buñuel cinema, where the screening was starting within the hour, I saw two men embrace each other when their patience finally paid off.
That’s a lot of anxious energy surrounding a screening of a 55-year-old film that hasn’t been hard to see — in one form or another — in recent times. But that “one form or another” caveat is pretty crucial: After being dogged by censorship for so much of its lifetime, Russell’s masterpiece still carries the aura of a suppressed or forbidden film, or most tantalizingly of all, a dangerous one. Unless you’ve really kept on top of its release history, you might be unsure of which cut you’ve seen — though if you have seen one with the infamous, trouble-making “Rape of Christ” sequence not excised, you certainly won’t have forgotten that detail.
And so this Cannes screening — promising not just a visually immaculate experience, assembled from the original camera negative, but a complete and uncut one — had a pleasing ring of comprehensive authority to it. After all, it was being presented, alongside Russell’s widow Lisi Tribble, by Mark Kermode, the British critic who has fought longest and hardest to have Russell’s original vision protected and preserved. (Kermode is also a proudly vocal Cannes agnostic: If he was drawn to the Croisette to present something, it was surely an occasion.) I’d seen the complete cut of “The Devils” before, but not with this degree of ceremony and anticipation: Sitting inside the Buñuel as latecomers tensely scanned the rows for free spaces, with guests including Honorary Palme d’Or winner Peter Jackson already seated, you’d have sworn the film was about to be premiered for the first time.
For many in the room, though, it was an altogether new discovery: When Kermode began his intro by asking who had never seen the film before, it seemed the majority of hands went up. They’ve come to it at the right time. The restoration (which will receive a theatrical release in October) is a stunner, in particular sharpening the film’s stylized black-and-white-and-blood-and-mud color palette to glistening effect, and the film, well, remains like nothing you’ve ever seen before. (Even if you have seen it before, it reveals new facets and aspects and curiosities every time.) Among the first-timers was my fellow Variety critic Siddhant Adlakha who, when I asked him his thoughts, described it with a grin as “kookier than I expected.”
He’s not wrong. It’s a film about severely horrible historical events: the downfall and eventual execution of 17th-century Roman Catholic priest Urbain Grandier (here an unrepentant horndog played with lascivious brilliance by Oliver Reed), accused of witchcraft by a corrupt Church after a convent under his watch claimed demonic possession. But the great joy of “The Devils” remains how ripe and camp and sensual and funny it is, qualities indulged at full tilt by Russell (not a director who even knew the meaning of “half”) in all aspects from performance to production design to orgy choreography.
The two scenes everybody knows about in “The Devils” are the two that not everybody has seen: the aforementioned “Rape of Christ” setpiece, in which a horde of nude nuns sexually defile a statue of Jesus, and what we shall call a different kind of boning scene, in which Vanessa Redgrave’s hunchbacked abbess Sister Jeanne des Anges masturbates with the charred femur of the newly burned-at-the-stake Grandier.
These moments were always intended to shock and/or delight, but in the full, heaving context of “The Devils,” they don’t stand out as try-hard provocations. Especially minus the impositions of any censors, the complete film stands as such a loud, lavish, full-hearted protest against forces that would restrict our thoughts, acts and desires — be it the Catholic Church or a film ratings board — that its most violent excesses feel not just titillating but truthful in expression. As Kermode reminded the audience in his intro, Russell described “The Devils” as “my most — indeed my only — political film,” and its rallying cry against conservative brainwashing is still pretty resonant in 2026, with freedom of expression, religion and sexuality now feeling like rights that can’t be taken for granted.
It’s certainly grander and riskier and more untamed than anything else at what has been a very solid Cannes Film Festival so far — rich in good, meaningful films and even one or two transcendent ones, but thus far lacking the kind of new, declarative lightning rod that instantly becomes the stuff of festival lore, like David Cronenberg’s “Crash,” Gaspar Noé’s “Irreversible” or Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist.” If the film does have a spiritual analog in this year’s Cannes program, it might be Jane Schoenbrun’s gleefully received postmodern slasher movie “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” a film in thrall to the once-forbidden pleasures of the video nasty, and celebratory of cinema’s power to break taboos for us, turning us on in the process. “The Devils” isn’t originally a piece of Cannes history (in fact, it played Venice in its time, picking up Best Director), but it has, both graciously and outrageously, loaned this year’s fest its eruptive, corruptive legacy.
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