131 min | NR | December 3, 2021 | IFC Films
A seventeenth-century nun has visions of Christ, claims the stigmata, and takes a younger sister into her bed. The convent calls it a miracle. Paul Verhoeven calls it a power grab, and he is not wrong.
Benedetta Carlini enters a Tuscan convent as a child and grows into a nun who sees visions of Christ. The wounds of the stigmata appear on her body. Her sisters and superiors treat her as a living saint. Paul Verhoeven films all of it as a question about whether faith is real or whether faith is a tool. The miracles arrive exactly when Benedetta needs leverage, and the film refuses to confirm whether she believes her own performance.
Virginie Efira plays Benedetta with a face that never settles into a single reading. She delivers ecstatic visions and naked ambition with the same conviction, and that ambiguity is the engine of the film. Charlotte Rampling plays the abbess Sister Felicita as a woman who understands institutional power and watches a rival rise. Rampling underplays everything and lands her cruelty in stillness. Daphné Patakia plays Bartolomea as the earthy counterweight to Benedetta’s spiritual claims, a peasant who wants pleasure and says so. Lambert Wilson arrives late as the Nuncio and brings the cold machinery of the Church to crush what it cannot control.
Verhoeven directs from a script he wrote with David Birke, and he stages the religious imagery to provoke. The visions of Christ are lit and shot like pulp fantasy, all swords and writhing snakes, deliberately cheap against the somber convent interiors. The contrast is the point. Verhoeven shoots the seductions and the violence with the same flat directness, refusing to let the audience separate the holy from the carnal. The production design keeps the plague-era squalor in frame so the spiritual claims never float free of the bodies making them.
This is late Verhoeven working the same vein as Elle and Showgirls. He builds a story about a woman who weaponizes the only system that will have her and dares you to decide if she is a fraud. The film delivers blasphemy and provocation with full commitment and never apologizes. It does not resolve whether Benedetta is a saint or a con artist because Verhoeven thinks the institution cannot tell the difference either. That is the sharpest joke in the film, and it cuts.