Paul Verhoeven's controversial arthouse film Benedetta, a hot-and-bothered riff on the nunsploitation genre, airs on Film4 tonight. The film, now streaming on Mubi as part of a mini-season dedicated to that very bracket of cinema, tells the only notionally fact-based story of a 17th-century Italian nun's scandalous lesbian affair with a fellow sister, complete with fire, serpents and nuns in full makeup.
Verhoeven's film joins a heavenly sisterhood of nun-themed movies that ranges from the ravishing Black Narcissus (BritBox) to the all-star Doubt (Prime). Black Narcissus, Powell and Pressburger's 1947 exploration of sexual yearnings among brides of Christ, was condemned as 'an affront to religion' by the Catholic Legion of Decency but still retains a nervy potency.
Old Hollywood kept its nuns more wholesome: Deborah Kerr kept her wimple on in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (Amazon Prime), a charming romantic comedy with Robert Mitchum, while Audrey Hepburn gave perhaps her richest dramatic performance in The Nun's Story (Apple TV). More recently, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt (Prime) attempted to restore respectability, though Meryl Streep's reverend mother is essentially a high-camp creation.
World cinema has given us some of the most challenging nun studies, from Luis Buñuel's viscerally upsetting Viridiana (1961; Filmbox) to Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's scabrously critical Beyond the Hills (2012; BFI Player). By the time you get to Anne Fontaine's quietly searing The Innocents (Chili), about Polish Catholic nuns raped by Soviet soldiers, the life of the nun doesn't look so glossed-up by the movies after all.
