The Devils’ advocate: Guillermo del Toro on the film’s darkness and light

There are some movies, and some filmmakers, that are born savage… Ken Russell and The Devils (1971) are prime examples. 

The material Russell adapted came from Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun (1952) and John Whiting’s play The Devils (1961). These sources merged seamlessly with Russell’s hectic style and Derek Jarman’s exquisite, distilled production design which, with its restricted colour and shape palette, sports some of the greatest and most expressionistic and grandiose film sets this side of silent cinema. 

My three favourite Ken Russell films are Women in Love (1969), The Devils and Savage Messiah (1972). In these three films, the yin and yang of filmic energies is unassailable. What I mean by that is that in his best films, Russell’s exuberance is always tampered by a key, more subdued collaborator: either cinematography, production design or even source material provide this counterbalance. 

I believe these clashes root Russell and add a platform or grounding for his flights of fancy and the often sonorous, always earnest performance of his cast. 

In The Devils, Oliver Reed, already a singularity of an actor, seems almost naturalistic – perhaps because he embodies the pure and unbridled human spirit. He is matched and counterpointed by the tight presence and speech of Vanessa Redgrave – a performance she punctuates with syncopated bursts of madness and excess. Reed pours, indeed cascades out but Redgrave keeps most of her contents under pressure. 

The camerawork has a dizzy intoxication that approximates a musical – Busby Berkeley gone full Carl Jung. The infestation is completed by a truly diabolical, peerless score by Peter Maxwell Davies. It’s music that merges the totality and binds it together. 

Russell was an iconoclast, to say the least, and he made a film that lives perennially in the now: an impassioned plea against totalitarian systems and the eternal playbook they use to divide us all, either by vaudevillian sentiment or spiritual blackmail. 

Through the years I have come to study and even memorise the film, but I was absolutely unprepared for the exquisite, devoted and pristine restoration and remixing of the film. Seeing that, I discovered I had, in fact, never seen The Devils the way it was intended. Prepare yourself for a full-frontal punch in the mouth.