Don't Deliver Us from Evil

Anne de Boissy and Lore Fournier are two adolescent Angevin girls who stay at a Catholic boarding school. Both have affluent and conservative families living in the countryside. Anne and Lore quickly become friends. They spend most of their time reading poems about the beauty of death, mocking their classmates and teachers, and engaging in vicious pranks and petty theft, believing that not only is church downright fatuous, but also for idiots, as well as that the both of them together are special, and untouchable—a fact that seems more and more true to them with each passing day when they manage to escape detection and punishment by usually blaming it on their fellow peers.

When Anne's parents take a long trip and leave Anne behind during summer vacation, Lore secretly moves into their château with Anne. The girls set fire to the barn of the local cowherd, Émile, and let his cows loose as punishment for his attempted sexual on Lore. Anne also kills two pet birds belonging to Léon, her mentally handicapped groundskeeper, as well as ripping up his clothes and taking his letters just to make him suffer. Stealing sacramental bread and traditional priest uniforms from the church, the girls prepare the abandoned chapel at the château for a Black Mass in which they wed themselves to Satan, promising more wicked works in his name, even cutting both of their fingers and joining each other's blood so that their bond will become stronger.

One night, a motorist runs out of gasoline near the château. The girls invite him in, offer him alcohol, and begin to behave seductively toward him. The man attempts to rape Lore and Anne bludgeons him to death in Lore's defense. The two dispose of the motorist's body by dumping it in the lake, and immediately grow fearful of being caught.

Police later find the motorist's abandoned car and suspect foul play. A detective arrives at the château to inquire if the motorist stopped there, but is suspicious when the girls behave nervously and refuse to tell them where their parents are. The girls in turn become convinced that the detective knows what they have done and plan a suicide pact, convinced they will go to Hell and be rewarded by Satan for their service. At a school recital, the girls read out loud a rather grim yet equally eloquent poem by Baudelaire. The nuns become increasingly suspicious as to what Anne and Lore are up to, since they have no idea what the girls are plotting, or of their secret suicide pact. However they are too late to interfere in what is unfolding, and everyone in the room is engrossed with the girls' performance. After reading the poem, while members in the audience start to both cheer and clap in applause, both girls cover their clothes with petrol and set themselves ablaze. The audience, including the girls' parents, panic and rush for the doors as the girls burn to death on stage.

The film's screenplay by writer-director Joël Séria was loosely based on the 1954 Parker–Hulme murder case in New Zealand, in which two adolescent girls—Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme—plotted and killed Parker's mother.[5]

The film was screened as part of the Directors Fortnight at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival,[1] It was submitted for approval by the British Board of Film Classification in December 1971 and received an X rating[2] before being released theatrically in the United Kingdom on 7 January 1972.[4][6] Despite significant cuts, the film was banned in its native France by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs,[4][7][8] who issued the statement:

The theme, extremely daring in itself, has been exploited to the full and gives rise to a work that the Commission considers as one of the most unhealthy that it has had to examine, on account of the perversion, the sadism and the seeds of moral and mental destruction that are contained therein.[9]

It also went unreleased theatrically in the United States.[1] The film's controversy was utilized in its British marketing campaign, which advertised it as "The French film banned in France!"[10]

• Les Chants de Maldoror, which the girls read from and reference.
• Les Fleurs du mal, from which the girls chant various poems before dying.
• Heavenly Creatures, another film based on the same murder case.

• Wilson, Shelby LeAnn (2022). Spectacular Flesh: Erotic Horror as Feminist Praxis in Women's Literature & Film (PhD Literature thesis). UC Santa Cruz. pp. Preface

• Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal at IMDb