Benedetta (2021)

Paul Verhoeven returns to the convent with Benedetta, a film in which a 17th-century nun develops stigmata, political ambition, and a robust appetite for a fellow sister. The relationship between Benedetta and Bartolomea is not subtext or implication. It is the engine of the plot, the object of the Inquisition's inquiry, and the reason the wooden Virgin Mary meets a fate no catechism anticipated. On the matter of same-sex romance, the film is exhaustively, almost administratively thorough.

The picture also advances a sturdy feminist case. Benedetta outmaneuvers the abbess, claims authority inside a hierarchy built to exclude her, and treats her own desire as a legitimate theological position. Verhoeven, being Verhoeven, frames much of this through flesh and provocation, which tempers the sermonizing without removing the argument. The historical record gets similar handling. Judith Brown's account of a real lesbian nun, suppressed for centuries, becomes a queer rereading of Church power, padded with invented mobs and borrowed Joan of Arc imagery. The revision is bold. The scholarship is elastic.

What the film declines to do is address the modern catalogue. The cast is uniformly white and European, and the screenplay never pauses to notice. There is no economic critique, though Church corruption is on full display. No environmental allegory, despite the plague doing such reliable work. No meditation on body image, no framing of neurodivergence, no racial commentary. Benedetta's visions remain a matter of faith, fraud, or both, never diagnosis. Verhoeven is many things, but he is not a lecturer, and he has no interest in explaining anyone's contemporary obligations to them. The result satisfies the carnal and the historical appetites while ignoring most of the modern checklist entirely. It provokes. It does not instruct.

{"thematic_tags": ["true_story", "book_adaptation"]}