Benedetta is the new film from the great prophet of psychosexual cinema, Paul Verhoeven. It dramatizes (and in some ways underdramatizes) the life of a nun who climbed to an unusually high station of influence in the Counter-Reformation-era Catholic Church. According to the authoritative account of the real Sister Benedetta Carlini’s life, Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, Benedetta leveraged her outrageous, ecstatic visions of Christ, manifestation of stigmata, and all wonder of miracles visible only to her to transcend the oppressive, patriarchal strictures that the times closed around women.

As in Verhoeven’s film, Benedetta assumed power over her convent and staged ostentatious spectacles that would have been completely alien in seventeenth-century monastic culture. These included a ceremony in which she wed herself to an invisible Christ (and played both parts) and an illicit affair with a novice nun named Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia). Eventually she attracted the disapproval of regional clerics who condemned her vanity, and she was punished.

This is where the similarities between historical and filmic text stop. Where Verhoeven parts ways with Brown’s account and why are the most interesting parts of the film, interesting enough to redeem what can appear on the surface the least complex and least thrilling “erotic thriller” of his career. Across four centuries and mediated through far more interpretations and adaptations than just Brown’s (documentary filmmaker Su Friedrich’s sensuous 1987 short, Damned If You Don’t, is notable among them), where does one begin to assess the impact of Verhoeven’s take on the lesbian nun story? If one fears, as Benedetta did, that they have trespassed against Him, there’s only one place to start: the confessional.