In 2026, religious provocation is hardly new. What once was enough to scandalize an audience, or even get a film banned, might now pass through the cultural landscape without a mention. Few films have tested the boundaries of religious iconography like Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), a film about 17th-century nuns whose alleged demonic possession became a chance for the preeminent religious and political powers to collide.

For nearly five decades cinephiles have lusted for something that seemed lost forever to the vaults of Warner Bros—a director’s cut of The Devils, with previously unseen footage, and a full 4K restoration from the original 35 mm film, presented exactly as director Ken Russell intended it to be viewed. Based on Aldous Huxley’s historical non-fiction book, The Devils of Loudun, the film follows an account of a 17th- century case of demonic possession at a convent, and how it leads to consolidation of the powers of church and state.

On October 16, The Devils was released for a small scale theatrical run in the U.S. that will later extend to Europe. It begs the question, why now, and is it as sacreligious, horrifying, and grotesque as it’s been made out to be?

I arrived at my local independent theater on a Saturday night, with tickets purchased a month prior. Usually you buy a movie ticket when you get there, but demand for this film had people scrambling to get tickets as soon as they were released. Walking through the parking garage, I saw a hooded figure, scrolling on their phone, head to toe dressed as a nun. Another step into the theater, it was jam-packed, with a lobby full of excited chatter, reminiscent of a kind of moviegoing experience that seemed to disappear after COVID. I’ve never seen the film, only heard of how its graphic nature was considered so inflammatory that it was widely censored and banned when it was originally released, with entire scenes cut from it that were deemed too graphic and troubling to view.

I was expecting the film to be beyond blasphemous to believers, I was expecting it to be graphic in every sense of the word, and I was expecting it to feel somewhat dated. What I didn’t expect was a movie that would have the packed theater howling with laughter, political commentary that felt eerily relevant (humans remain the same, after all), and a film so spectacularly beautiful that I am still trying to understand how it was constructed. There is a scene where the sound design is so crisp and clear that you can hear fabric shuffling across a tiled surface while a nun crawls on her knees; few movies today preserve this kind of ambient sound. Preserving this kind of detail anchors the actors in the set, and keeps the audience grounded in the viewing experience.

The production design is astounding, even more so considering it was the first feature film the designer Derek Jarman worked on. All of the sets are practical, and are so singular to the world Ken Russell was crafting, that they feel completely timeless, even after all these decades have passed. From the constructed city of Loudun, to the asylum-like sterility of the convent, the surreal set design drops you into a blend of historical reality and a fantastical nightmare. While the film can sometimes veer into camp, the craftsmanship always immerses the viewer back into the story.

The movie culminates with the realization that corrupt people make corrupt institutions, and mass delusions rooted in fear can be exploited for political gain. The film reveals that the real evil is not the devil, but the ease with which people turn belief into justification for cruelty. What makes The Devils so disturbing is not simply the violence on screen, but the way an entire society can be drawn into a fiction that serves those in power. It’s been more than fifty years since its original release, but The Devils still provokes laughter, shock and disbelief. The mechanisms behind the hysteria feel familiar: the impulse to find a scapegoat, and to present cruelty as a moral and spiritual imperative. These are societal patterns that we have yet to leave behind.