When I first saw Warner Bros. Clockwork’s stylish, strobe-light-heavy, fever-dream trailer announcing the 4K director’s cut restoration of Ken Russell’s The Devils, I knew I had to see it on the big screen. Partly because I wanted to know how it earned its reputation as “the most controversial film ever made,” a relic so elusive you had to spelunk through horror-collector back channels to find it. And honestly, I wondered whether it’d add fuel to my ongoing lament that today’s films are starved of the wild, pure artistry that defined the ’70s. After seeing the film in 35mm at my beloved Music Box Theater in Chicago, I got far more than I bargained for: The Devils is the most rousing, grotesquely alive cinematic experience I’ve seen all year.

Based on Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun , The Devil s sees the secluded convent of Loudun in hysterics. At the epicenter of the hooplah is Father Urbain Grandier, the most attractive man alive, whose actor, Oliver Reed, quite literally has the widest chest I’ve ever seen committed to film. The mustachioed priest has been accused of witchcraft. His accuser is Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), a sexually repressed, hunchbacked nun. Jeanne’s parasocial obsession with Grandier, whom she’s never met, serves as the perfect excuse for the corrupt members of the church to unite with Grandier’s enemies to have him sentenced to death for bringing the devil into God’s house. What follows is 114 minutes where humor and horror gnaw at the same bone: a barrage of campy satire that elbows the ribs of religious piety that’s equal parts riotous and revolting.

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