Benedetta

Dir: Paul Verhoeven 
2022 France/Belgium/Netherlands  2hrs 11mins
Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling,  Daphne Patakia 

Subtitled – French

Benedetta is a 2021 biographical drama directed and co-written by Paul Verhoeven. Virginie Efira stars as Bendetta Carlini, a 17-century novice nun, who becomes entangled in a forbidden lesbian love affair. It is her shocking religious visions that threaten to shake the Church to its core.  

'In Benedetta, master provocateur Paul Verhoeven demolishes the line between the sacred and the profane.' Clarisse Loughrey, Independent (UK)

'A funny, filthy, iconoclastic riot. Paul Verhoeven’s latest erotic satire won’t be for all creeds, but it is bursting with enough ideas that even doubters can find something to believe in here.' John Nugent, Empire Magazine

'Whatever reactions Verhoeven hopes to elicit during the film’s final half-hour, numbness surely couldn’t be among them. Let us be grateful, though, that at 83 years old he remains as iconoclastic, and as unable to rein himself in, as ever.' Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman