Benedetta review – fun nunsploitation satire gets stuck in purgatory

Paul Verhoeven’s nunsploitation drama Benedetta wavers between guilty pleasure glee and tasteless showboating: perfectly on brand, then, for the 83-year old veteran who has spent his career peddling a particular sort of airbrushed schlock to the delight of voyeuristic cinephiles. Perhaps more than any of his works, this is a true baptism of fire into his world, a satirical takedown of an insular society told with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

After seemingly displaying her ability to control animals, devout child Benedetta buys a place in a convent in Pescia, already harbouring a fervid love for the Virgin Mary. Eighteen years later, adult Benedetta (Virginie Efira) is one of the most pious sisters in the abbey, who takes pity on Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), a woman who comes to the convent begging for help after fleeing from her rapist father and brothers.

The more the two women interact with one another, the more frequent are Benedetta’s intensely realistic hallucinations that she is the wife of Jesus Christ, her body marked by stigmata – the wounds of Jesus as he was placed on the cross. Many of her peers, including the foreboding Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling), think she is faking: as the film progresses, you too begin to wonder what is meant to be real, deliberate, serious or moving among the balls-to-the-wall madness.

Part of the charm of a Verhoeven film is trying to guess which moments are meant to be funny (the audience at the London Film Festival had a hoot at every other line, cursed dream sequence, and CGI snake). But as Efira flip-flopped between saintly schoolgirlishness and a young Reagan in The Exorcist – just one step removed from gleefully masturbating with a crucifix and yelling “fuck me!” to anyone in particular – I began to wonder why I'd expected anything less from a director who has flagrantly showcased his tonal wobbliness and horndog leanings. Not only are we meant to believe that Benedetta transforms from a pale brunette child to a blonde adult with a St. Tropez tan, we’re also asked to buy a 24-year-old nun being played by a 44-year-old woman with plucked brows, mascara-streaked lashes, and a toned four-pack.

Despite this, Benedetta is very funny, with snarky little throwaway lines shared between nuns, fart jokes, and phallic visual gags aplenty. As a result, you may struggle to appreciate the film’s equally dutiful attempt to connect religious suffering with the ways we express and externalise love. But this is a satire, after all, and Benedetta does a grand job of depicting the gracelessness of the entire system of organised religion and the thinly veiled grabs for power disguised as dogmatic bureaucracy.

Charlotte Rampling is an expert at instilling fear in her authoritarian roles (fittingly, she also plays a character named “Reverend Mother” in this year's Dune). Here, she employs her trademark intimidation through her downturned mouth and steely eyes. Yet as plots thicken and she’s over-directed by Verhoeven into a hammy corner, the character loses its dimension. Underdeveloped also is Daphne Patakia as Benedetta’s lover, Bartolomea, a character who is subjected to an uncomfortable torture and sexual assault sequence, filmed with the same sort of detached, laissez-faire indifference as the sex scenes.

And yet, for my sins, I couldn’t help but enjoy this F-you to the nonsensical corruption and flagrant hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, articulated through fervent erotic obsession – even if Ken Russell did it better fifty years ago. The Verhoevenian frankness – you can almost feel him behind the camera saying “ja, they are breasts, so what?” – is a refreshing antidote to what seems like increasingly puritanical filmmaking, especially in regard to sex scenes. Hopefully camp and self-aware enough to skirt any real accusations of male gaze-y exploitation, Benedetta is a perfectly fun time, as long as you remember not to take it seriously.

Benedetta screened as part of BFI London Film Festival 2021. It will be released in UK cinemas on 15 April 2022.