Watching the film ‘Benedetta’, I cannot help but startle at the dark sides of human nature. Having said so, I, at the same time, find humans are bound to confront certain kinds of the dark side of human nature to avoid becoming a bad or evil person.

Nuns have had to live their lives under vows of a number of strict rules defying human natures. Benedetta arrives in the convent as a little girl to be a nun, in my observation, she is willing to do so despite the greater willingness of her parents in the first place. She has acquired a religious vision once arriving at the convent, she admires Jesus, Virgin Mary, and prays a lot. What she does in the film is largely to fight for the position of the abbess by showing more than a lot of times of her having a religious vision, aiming at making the current senior abbess abdicate. She succeeds, only at the expense of claiming a nun’s life who accuses her of telling lies but fails and at last commits suicide.

Sex has boldly and blasphemously played a rather major role in the film by having Benedetta and one other nun happily, innocently, and honestly play sex in more than a few scenes in the film. Despite attracting offensiveness and criticism for their eroticism, those scenes tell us nuns are human, and humans are entitled to basic instincts and human rights. In the film, Benedetta craves sex all the time, it is stemmed from the forbiddance of sexual desire of being a nun. She can only have the feeling of sex when she dreams at night until she meets and falls in love with a nun who arrives at the convent later. Undoubtedly, human is natural, that’s why we have human nature, and sex is one of them. Forcing people to restrain from having sex is unnatural and it would only draw immense backfire. Benedetta has proved the case. 

The film also points out that not all the nuns in the convent are holy religious, putting the spirit of religion first. In the movie, a character playing the senior abbess is particularly impressive, who avariciously tells the world that the convent is not a place for charity, demanding those who come to be nuns a considerable sum of money. The power struggle has also brazenly popped up in the film when most of us reasonably expect religious places to be virtuous and incorruptible places. Once again, the film tells us religion is human but not just gods.