Charles drifts from political rallies to religious gatherings and even psychoanalysis, searching for some certainty of existence, but he comes away empty-handed. When even love fails to give him a reason to go on, he resolves to die and pays his drug-addicted friend Valentin to kill him. The film opens with two contradictory newspaper headlines reporting Charles’s death, then works backward through the time that leads to that end.

In Robert Bresson’s Le diable probablement..., the young man’s despair is not “explained” as psychology; instead, the film approaches it obliquely, accumulating sensations—apparitions and omens—within a world where politics, religion, and love have all lost their force. For that very reason, the film provoked controversy in France, where it was restricted to audiences aged 18 and over out of concern that it might encourage imitative suicides. Among Bresson’s late works, The Devil, Probably remains especially suffocating—one of his darkest films, pushed through to the end without offering hope.