Benedetta

Paul Verhoeven returned to European cinema for the first time since Black Book (2006) with Benedetta, which competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Adapted from Judith C. Brown's 1986 scholarly study Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, the film marks the culmination of a project Verhoeven had been developing for over a decade, reuniting him with screenwriter David Birke. A French-language co-production between France, the Netherlands and Belgium, it was released in France in July 2021 and reached international audiences through MUBI and IFC Films later that year.

Virginie Efira plays the historical figure Benedetta Carlini, who enters the Theatine convent at Pescia as a young child and rises through its hierarchy while the plague advances through the Tuscan countryside. Charlotte Rampling is the formidable abbess Felicita; Daphné Patakia plays the novice Bartolomea, whose arrival upends the convent's order. Cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie shoots Verhoeven's material with a cool, painterly precision — candlelit interiors recall Flemish religious art — while the score by Anne Dudley threads ecclesiastical formality against the film's increasingly unruly drama. The structure follows Benedetta's ascent through religious office as her stigmata and visions draw both devotion and suspicion.

Benedetta arrived to divided but largely engaged critical reception; its Cannes competition slot confirmed that Verhoeven, then 82, remained an active provocateur rather than a heritage figure. The film was praised above all for Efira's controlled, commanding performance — she received a César nomination for Best Actress — and for the precision with which it treats questions of power, gender and institutional faith. It sits in a direct lineage with Verhoeven's long-standing interest in transgression within systems of authority.