Kawalerowicz contemplates scourged souls and the desolation of a world abandoned by God in his exploration of the possessions at Loudun

In 1615, life as a secular priest must have presented Urbain Grandier seemingly limitless possibilities. As Aldous Huxley writes in The Devils of Loudun, “There might be a chaplaincy to some great noble… invitations to display his remarkable eloquence before bishops… diplomatic missions.” Instead, Grandier became Loudun’s parson a few years later and found himself settling into a life of scandalous feuds with local monks and affairs with his parishioners. This life of contended controversy didn’t last long. Running afoul of Cardinal Richelieu, abandoning the pregnant daughter of a good friend, and marrying Madeleine De Brou all, in Huxley’s words, added links to “the chain that was to draw him to his doom.” Grandier’s powerful enemies found an opportunity to dispatch with him when Sister Jeanne and Loudun’s convent of Ursuline nuns began to report possession. Grandier, whom the sisters had never met, was allegedly visiting them in erotic dreams, perhaps spurring on their strange and blasphemous displays. Public exorcisms drew further attention before Grandier was tried, tortured, and executed in 1634.

Huxley’s exploration of these events inspired John Whiting’s 1961 stage adaptation, which provided the framework for the most famous depiction of the possessions at Loudun, Ken Russell’s still-censored The Devils (1971). Russell casts Oliver Reed as Grandier, Vanessa Redgrave as Sister Jeanne, and Gemma Jones as Madeleine De Brou. He stages the fantasies that led to the exorcisms and execution in vivid, sacrilegious detail. While Russell’s film remains a controversial and titillating favorite, the best cinematic take on the possessions at Loudun precedes The Devils. Released a decade earlier, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) takes place several years later and transports the action to Smolensk. Mother Joan’s monochrome palette, sparse set design, and despairing conclusion validate at least the latter part of the prediction Father Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton), an exorcist, makes as The Devils closes:

“There’ll be a few tourists occasionally to brighten things up — but they won’t last long — soon the town will die and you will be left in peace — and oblivion.”

There’s some historical precedent in the fictional Laubardemont’s words. After Grandier’s torture and execution, the possessions at Loudun then stopped — for a time. Before long, the city’s cloister of Ursuline nuns reported visitations again. As predicted, they attracted some crowds as well as more interventions from Church authorities. 

The Jesuit mystic Father Jean-Joseph Surin was among the new exorcists dispatched to address the possessions. He is said to have prayed to transfer the demons from Sister Jeanne’s body to his own. Contemporaries report that the incident caused a kind of nervous breakdown characterized by hallucinations and years of erratic behavior. Though the accepted historical narrative suggests a peaceful resolution for Surin — he is said to have recovered — Kawalerowicz offers viewers no such reprieve, none of Laubardemont’s predicted peace. The Devils may see characters subjected to the boot, holy water enemas, and the wheel, but it’s Kawalerowicz who spends the entire runtime of Mother Joan contemplating scourged souls and the desolation of a world abandoned by God. 

Kawalerowicz casts Mieczysław Voit as Józef Suryn and sends him to an uninviting inn located just across an apocalyptic-looking field from Mother Joan (Lucyna Winnicka) and her convent. The credits roll over a prostrate Suryn, who whispers Latin prayers into the floorboards. His barely audible, untranslated speech keeps us at arm’s length. We’re not gaining insights into his relationship with God but watching him erect a barrier between himself and the world of sinners, a world that includes nearly everyone on screen and the entirety of the audience. Even priests and nuns don’t typically pray face down like this unless they’re taking their vows. Some converts take this position when transitioning into the Catholic faith. The implication seems to be that Suryn recommits himself to God daily and approaches his work with a new convert’s intensity. Rising, the priest coughs as if exhausted from the effort. Already Kawalerowicz establishes Suryn’s over-the-top devotion, a commitment to performing humility that crosses into hubris.

Suryn’s style of slicing bread certainly strikes Wołodkowicz (Zygmunt Zintel) this way. “You’ll hardly know it’s bread you’re eating,” the trollish local notes, after watching the priest make a breakfast of mere slivers. He sees right through the act and Suryn’s retorts don’t chasten him. Recognizing the spiritual gorging behind the asceticism, he quips, “You must be a remarkable glutton, Father.” Throughout the film, we’ll continually observe the extent of Suryn’s gluttony and the perils of insisting on such a Christlike posture. In the exorcist’s humble quarters, a whip occupies a prominent space on the wall, hanging like a crucifix might in a more typical room. By attempting to emulate Christ, Suryn may have already lost sight of him. With an unflinching eye, Kawalerowicz shows us the dangerous self-deception that not only keeps believers like Suryn in a state of subjugation but practically necessitates violence. Crucially, he not only denies us the exposed flesh and explicit violence later seen in The Devils but consciously avoids Russell’s moments of grace, too. 

If you know just one thing about Russell’s film it’s probably that several sequences were excised and that only an incomplete version of The Devils has ever seen an official release.¹ Despite its smutty reputation, Russell’s interests go far beyond the prurient. Like Kawalerowicz, he asks what it means to live a Christ- or saintlike life and whether such an achievement is truly possible or advisable. Unlike Kawalerowicz, who described his film as “against dogma,” Russell was a convert to Catholicism. In a 1970 interview with Film Comment, Russell points to both this fact and his focus on 17th-century French political machinations as distinguishing factors between his film (still just a script and imagined scenes at this point) and Mother Joan. “My Catholic background,” he said, “helps me to distinguish between normal religious practices and the bizarre things attributed to the nuns in The Devils. Since Kawalerowicz is not a Christian, the whole idea of convent life would seem bizarre to him.” A strict emphasis on the film’s blaspheming belies both the political intrigue on display and, more importantly, the earnestness of Grandier and Madeleine’s devotion. In numerous sequences, Russell intercuts between the couple and the escalating exhibitions at the convent. 

It’s fair to say that simply subverting religious rituals or iconography no longer surprises in 2024. Kenneth Anger showed us a mad biker pissing in his helmet and offering it up like Communion wine in Scorpio Rising (1963) almost a decade before The Devils. Even in mainstream cinema, Nunsploitation remains an enduring subgenre. However arresting, the infamous “Rape of Christ” sequence in The Devils fails to rise above mere shock value. By this point, we’ve already seen Sister Jeanne’s fantasies of coupling with Christ in the form of Grandier. Though it reaches new heights of ecstatic depravity, The Devils also reaches an artistic nadir when Father-Canon Jean Mignon (Murray Melvin), masturbating under his robes, climbs a ladder to look down on the action. Adopting his point of view, the camera zooms in and out with penetrative thrusts. The gesture goads the censors and gilds the lily. 

In Mother Joan, the charred site of the executed Grandier (renamed Garniec) sits right at the center of the film’s action, a midway point between the fatalistic bacchanal of the inn and the seemingly choreographed sacrilege at the convent. Suryn and the viewer learn about Garniec and all the goings on at the convent during Mother Joan’s first act. “He wasn’t a saint,” one character says, while another probes for details about the nuns’ scandalous performances and the priest’s grisly death. Like countless horror-film protagonists, Suryn hears warning after warning and chooses to ignore them all. For one, the nuns have inexplicably been expecting his arrival. The way the inn’s employees and residents divulge details seems calibrated to offend Suryn’s sensibilities. We learn that Odryn (Franciszek Pieczka) breaks from custom to perform odd jobs for the nuns, including slaughtering livestock. Eating meat is among the sins the Devil asks of them, but it’s relatively tame compared to some of their “tricks.” The priest looks utterly terrified in several close-ups and it seems a justified reaction to the way Antosia (Maria Chwalibóg) or Odryn will suddenly dominate the frame and all the impish hectoring of Wołodkowicz. The gossip continues once Suryn is gone, a standard type of sequence in the film to come. We observe how the convent’s bedevilment has both traumatized and titillated the community. Odryn’s eyes light up when he recalls the nuns stripping their clothes and go lifeless when he recalls Garniec’s clothes burning, his body roasting.

Though the atmosphere in Smolensk is uneasy, the townspeople aren’t all so antagonistic. Kaziuk (Jerzy Kaczmarek) and Juraj (Jarosław Kuszewski), the stable grooms, don’t show the same glee in discussing Garniec’s brutal end. Juraj wears an almost childish look of terror on his face, wide-eyed like Suryn. The grooms are perhaps alone among the film’s characters in how they spend alone time. Rather than gossiping about the nuns’ performances or Suryn’s unfitness to address it, they discuss their own lives. We see how Kaziuk counsels Juraj to steer clear of the Devil and put aside wrath. The older groom chides his friend for dreaming of killing his abusive father, encouraging him to pray for his soul instead. A God’s-eye-view shot of the pair settling down to sleep in a pile of hay looks just the opposite of our intro to Suryn. While Suryn’s faith leaves him isolated and staring into nothingness, the grooms reflect on the heavens together. This sequence sits between an unsettling one-sided dialogue² from Suryn and the beginning of Mother Joan’s central exorcism sequence. Juxtaposed against Suryn’s self-aggrandizing descriptions of his crusade, the convent’s dubious evocations of possession, and the feckless efforts of the exorcists, Kaziuk and Juraj look almost idealized in this humble expression of unwavering faith. Even if Suryn hadn’t just stumbled upon an ax, perhaps left in the stables by the Devil, we’d worry about their fates. 

Juraj is an aide to Suryn and a favorite playmate of Garniec’s orphaned children, left under the care of Father Brym. While The Devil’s counts a memorable assortment of clergymen among its cast, Brym is the only other priest we’ll spend any time with in Mother Joan. The local parson practically rolls his eyes when the Jesuit describes fasting and flagellating himself in anticipation of his encounter with the nuns and, perhaps, the Devil himself. “I am still afraid of him,” Suryn admits, and Brym has to ask who exactly he means. Despite his profession and his proximity to all the years of attention-grabbing hysteria, he’s not convinced the Devil exists, nor is he afraid of his interventions in real life. He too scandalizes Suryn with his descriptions of the events behind the convent walls. He not only chides the nuns, calling them “wenches,” but takes particular offense at the way the exorcists contrive a public spectacle, the ways they prey on fear. Ultimately, he opts for grim detachment, half-joking, “Who knows, Father, maybe that’s the way saints are made.” He tries in vain to warn the priest about the trouble awaiting him, suggesting that neither the nuns nor the exorcists will prove amenable to his efforts. Suryn appears committed to rejecting any concerns, strangely proud of the fact that he knows “nothing of the world.”

We enter Suryn’s point of view as he slowly makes his way into the convent. The door seems to open itself, heightening the ghostly atmosphere. Our halting movements and the inexplicably empty frame make us feel vulnerable to sudden attack. A nun suddenly appears to close the gate, startling Juraj. Though the film itself may lack anything that would send viewer’s leaping from their seats, characters are always startling one another by entering the frame unexpectedly or suddenly changing their expressions. Suryn literally causes revelers at the inn to drop everything and call it a night when he cuts a ghoulish figure from across the dining room toward the end of the film. Suryn’s greatest scare comes during his initial meeting with Mother Joan. Standing behind a seated Joan, the priest can’t see the expressions on the Mother Superior’s face as she divulges the names of the eight demons inside her and provokes him with questions. We watch her face betray the glee she’s feeling. She can’t believe she’s getting away with it. As she turns to face him, she expresses the depths of her suffering in terms that underline how she, like Suryn, feels isolated in her faith and destined for something greater. “You,” she pleads, “are to lift me from this pit of solitude.” Immediately, we recognize a romantic quality in the words.

At first, Suryn seems optimistic that only spiritual laziness has possessed the convent. As Joan readies to leave, however, she suddenly affects a demonic voice and begins to creep alongside the walls of the room. Without the assistance of prosthetics,³ Winnicka twists her face and contorts her body. Her shouts echo off the stones like an infernal choir as she spits in Suryn’s direction, “Oh, don’t think it will be easy . . . you filthy priest.” The “serious exorcisms” that follow find Suryn and his peers looking utterly hapless. An imposing column of nuns dominates the frame as they file into the church to face a mid-sized crowd and a team of priests that includes a bored-looking Brym. Joan predictably takes the lead, taunting the priests in sweating, sneering close-ups and predicting countless cinematic exorcisms to come by bending into a back-bridge. Less unsettling is the choreographed performance she attempts to conduct. The other nuns aren’t too convincing. Most look to Joan as if following her lead, slowly and inexpertly mimicking her posture. When Joan throws herself to the ground and flops across the length of the stone floor, they seem genuinely surprised. We hear each smack as Joan rolls, reflecting the bodily toll possession (or “possession”) takes without showing us blood or excrement. An attempt to bind Joan and make her pay homage proves fruitless. She quickly slips her bonds and brings the nuns back under her command, they lie face-down as if in mockery of Suryn’s earlier prayer.

This ordeal leaves Suryn near tears and sends him into a frenzy of flagellation and face-down prayer. When Joan joins him and he asks her to “try to connect with [him] spiritually,” Kawalerowicz comes closest to indulging Wołodkowicz’s wishes for nudity. As Joan tears her garments and turns toward Suryn to expose her breasts, we cut away to a group of nuns rushing down a narrow flight of stairs. Reminiscent of ejaculation, the interlude takes us to a new setting with new heights of psychosexual tension. “No one will bother you here,” Sister Margaret says as she brings Joan and Suryn upstairs for solitary prayer. She sounds like she’s sending two lovers off to a secluded spot.

The isolated room’s provocative set dressing, dozens of white habits hanging on poles arranged like clotheslines, recalls the rest of that quote from Kawalerowicz about his film’s intentions. Speaking to Kinoeye’s Ray Privette he elaborates on Mother Joan’s rejection of dogma. “It is a love story about a man and a woman who wear church clothes,” he remarks, “and whose religion does not allow them to love each other.” While the Church forcibly separates Madeleine and Grandier in The Devils, the repression that keeps Suryn and Joan apart never appears to generate from outside them. In fact, Garniec’s death and the ongoing possessions seem to have made it easier than ever to move between the spiritual and sinful spheres.⁴ The fabric walls suggest the multiple layers of self-imposed repression between Suryn and Magda Jeanne. The poles sway and cause the habits to wave like mid-possession nuns swaying in their demonic ecstasy. It fills the air with a sense of erotic inevitability. Joan pushes garments aside as she walks toward Suryn, and all but propositions him, “and what if the Devil leaves me and enters you?”

A cut to a group of birds in flight suggests sexual climax like the earlier shot of running, waving nuns. We then return to the most intense self-flagellation yet. Both Joan and Suryn are stripped to the waist and heavily bruised from implied hours of whipping. There’s no doubt that we’re effectively watching a sex scene, especially when the couple rises to hastily dress on opposite sides of the room, stealing furtive glances at one another. When they leave after “so many days of prayer, so many acts of humility,” Suryn looks consumed with shame. It’s only a few moments before Joan says the demons are returning and Suryn makes a run for it. After finally shaking Joan loose, he retreats to the stake where Graniec was killed and falls to the ground in a pathetic heap. “Why have you forsaken me?” he cries, recalling words from Christ that only remind us what a pale imitation he has managed to offer. Compare these tears, for example, to Grandier’s dignity in the face of torture and death. He’ll paraphrase the Gospels once more, just before marching off to Mother Joan’s startling ending. He tells the townsfolk that God won’t mind their drinking and reveling, “[they] don’t know what they do.”

Suryn’s final consultation with Joan, now sequestered in an attic behind a gate, sees the nun explain the terrible truth behind her possession, her underlying obsession with eternal life through notoriety and sainthood. “The most terrible thing,” she confesses, “is that I love Satan… I’m proud to have been chosen.” Joan goes on to better define the “pit of isolation” she described earlier, the obscure life of any other nun, full of endless prayer and “beans in oil.” The priest fails to recognize the similarities to his own obsessive pursuit of purity. He, too, seems unwilling to settle for life as just any other “aimless wanderer.” Why else insist on attempting to endure a possession of his own? As she begs Suryn to make her a saint, he flees once again. After tumbling down the stairs, he’s followed by another rowdy column of nuns. A conversation with the more worldly Brym cannot shake him from the notion that he is now possessed or that this is a good thing. Echoing an earlier conversation with a local rabbi, he drones, “He is me, I am him,”⁵ before running outside. In a shot unlike any other in the film, we watch from Suryn’s perspective as he seems to writhe around on the ground. Where his predecessor weathered charges of consorting with demons and maintained his innocence to the last, Suryn endeavors to make himself the Devil’s servant, insists upon it. He ultimately lives out an inverted version of Grandier’s final moments in The Devils.

Throughout Grandier’s execution, Russell repeatedly forces us to see through the priest’s eyes, watching the mob from behind growing columns of fire. Even in his agony, Grandier maintains a straight-ahead gaze or slowly scans the faces in the crowd. If showing us Suryn’s disorienting acrobatics from his disturbed point of view was meant to evidence his possession (or “possession”) these shots confirm the opposite. Grandier has told the truth all along and is but a man. He appears to recognize this too, abandoning any delusions that he can redeem Loudun by dying for its sins. As his body smolders, Grandier shouts out to the jeering spectators. His words are anything like the conciliatory ones paraphrased by Suryn. Can God forgive a crowd that seems to know exactly what it’s doing? “Don’t look at me,” he cries, “look at your city! If your city is destroyed, your freedom is destroyed too!” His appeals to fight go unheeded and the city’s white walls crumble just as soon as he’s dead. He’ll only experience resurrection in Sister Jeanne’s continuing fantasies. Madeleine closes the film by walking off alone down an ashen path lined by Protestants broken on the wheel. She may as well be walking into Mother Joan’s color-leeched world and bringing the story full circle. 

Though his central priest survives, Kawalerowicz presents an even bleaker conclusion than Russell. Suryn never recognizes his unfitness to play the role of martyr or savior. He convinces himself that only a terrible crime, shedding innocent blood, will keep the Devil with him and save Mother Joan. He confirms what so many of the film’s characters have already suggested. That is, whether or not possession is a genuine phenomenon, whether or not the Devil is “real” in a scientific sense, the acts he is said to inspire already abound. God, for his part, is conspicuously absent from this corner of Smolensk. As Mother Joan receives the news of just how Suryn has ensured her demons will stay with him, she and Sister Margaret’s weeping overwhelms the soundtrack. We look up to see the church bells ringing, “for lost travelers,” but we can’t hear them.

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1. Though Warner Brothers has long avoided acknowledging the film, some familiar nuns appear in Space Jam 2’s Serververse. ↩︎
2.  “I come from light like you come from darkness,” he whispers into the mirror. Though he says he comes, “In the name of the Lord,” we can assume the distinction between Suryn and Christ himself has started to blur in the priest’s mind.  ↩︎
3.  Antosia predicts that Suryn will “fall in love with a humpback,” but Winnicka does not accentuate Joan/Jeanne’s disability like Vanessa Redgrave does in The Devils. The word “hump” never comes up again.  ↩︎
4.  It’s not just Odryn who makes regular trips between the inn and convent. Sister Margaret stops by whenever she can to offer the latest news from the convent. Father Suryn is shocked and offended the first time he spots her there.  ↩︎
5.  The phrase also echoes another excerpt from the above Kawalerowicz quote. He said, “This is a way to make the film very subjective, and very individual. We are not just watching these people from the side. We become them. We are in them, and they are in us. The whole film is about this. I wanted people watching the film to alternate between being him and being her.”  ↩︎