If joining a nunnery was half as exciting as many films make it look, surely more women would do so. On screen, the humble nun has been granted a level of alluring mystique and occasional glamour by the movies that doesn’t appear to match up with real life.
Sisters do it sexily for themselves in Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven’s wonderfully hot-and-bothered arthouse riff on the old nunsploitation genre – now streaming on Mubi as part of a mini-season dedicated to that very bracket of cinema. Mubi’s selections veer toward the classier end of the nunsploitation spectrum (you’ll have to search elsewhere on the internet for, say, Nude Nuns with Big Guns). Among them is the 1961 Polish provocation Mother Joan of the Angels, an austere, rather powerful version of the oft-recycled demonic-possession-at-the-convent story.
