Guillermo del Toro has seen a lot of films. He says he'd never actually watched Ken Russell's The Devils properly until this new restoration turned up. "The restoration of the material is like cleaning the Sistine Chapel with saliva," he said, which is either the strangest compliment of the year or the most accurate one.

The film in question has been a ghost for decades. Russell's 1971 drama, set in 17th-century France, follows a priest who protects the town of Loudun from a corrupt cardinal, only to be brought down by a nun's accusation of witchcraft. It starred Vanessa Redgrave as Sister Jeanne, Oliver Reed as Father Grandier, and Gemma Jones as Madeleine. It opened with an X rating in the US and got banned outright in some countries. That's how it's stayed for most of its life, cut up, censored, hard to see in anything close to its intended form.

What's different now is the source. Warner Bros' restoration label Clockwork, on its first-ever release, has gone back to the original camera negative and rebuilt the film using the edit Russell privately assembled in 2004, three years before he died. Over 164,472 frames of 35mm got restored for the job. A comparison trailer released this week shows the before-and-after on one key scene and the jump in clarity is not subtle.

The restored version already had its festival run. It premiered at Cannes in 2026 and has since played Sitges and TIFF, with a Los Angeles premiere lined up at Beyond Fest. None of that is small stuff for a film that spent most of its existence being treated like contraband by distributors and censors alike.

There's an argument to be had here, and film writers have been having it for years, about whether a director's late-life private edit should count as the definitive version of a film he made decades earlier when he was a different filmmaker entirely. Clockwork is clearly betting that audiences don't much care about that argument once they see the thing on a big screen in 4K.

Worth remembering too that 1971 was a stacked year for Russell. The Devils came out the same year as The Music Lovers and The Boy Friend, his sixth, seventh and eighth features arriving almost on top of each other. Not many directors get three films out in twelve months, let alone three this different from each other.

The restored cut opens in US theatres on October 16. There's no word yet on an Indian release or streaming date, though restorations like this one tend to find their way onto festival calendars and specialty screens eventually. For now, the only way to see it properly is to catch one of the festival dates or wait for October 16 in the US.