It might be based on a scholarly study of medieval nuns in Tuscany, but Benedetta, the new film from controversial director Paul Verhoeven, is full of lust, gore and brutality, and it has split opinion with equal violence at the Cannes film festival this weekend.

The film, by the Dutch director of Basic Instinct and Total Recall, is accused of blasphemy and misogyny by some critics, and of mere lurid camp theatricality by others. Scenes of torture and of explicit sex, one including the use of a statuette of the Virgin Mary as a sex toy, run through the film. While some critics have applauded Verhoeven’s bold showmanship, others left the premiere on Friday with a mix of amusement and anger.

Speaking on Saturday, the veteran director defended his new film from all charges. It is, he said, based on historic fact. “I don’t understand how you can be blasphemous about something that really happened four or five hundred years ago. That is wrong. It is done, you can’t change history. The word blasphemy in this case is stupid,” he said.

Blasphemous or not, it certainly follows the festival’s ignoble tradition of showing at least one outrageous film. It joins a list that includes Lars von Trier’s 2009 Antichrist, with its sadistic and masochistic acts, British director Michael Winterbottom’s 2004 erotic romance, 9 Songs, and Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible of 2002, which featured a prolonged rape scene. Benedetta’s screenplay, written by Verhoeven with David Birke, says yes to every excess, except at one notable point to a donkey.

Critics of the film this weekend are not so much shocked that Verhoeven has made an extreme film, or that Cannes has chosen to premiere it, but at the level of graphic violence and sex in an historical drama. Some critics have also spotted shades of Hammer Horror, while others have made comparisons to British Carry On comedies .

The film tells the story of a real-life figure, the abbess Benedetta Carlini, who claimed to have an intimate visionary relationship with Jesus while having more earthy intimate trysts with another nun. Those likely to be offended on religious grounds will probably never see the film.

Verhoeven, 82, who also made Robocop and Showgirls and who was acclaimed five years ago in Cannes for his film Elle, has now also called for a return to liberated attitudes to sex and nudity on screen.

“In general, when people have sex they take their clothes off,” he said. “I’m stunned that this puritanism has been introduced. It is wrong. I don’t think this is an improvement on what we had in the 70s with the sexual revolution, when everyone on the beaches was topless.”

Virginie Efira, who plays Benedetta, backed her director’s view: “There are not many directors who know how to film sex. But right from the beginning, Paul has done that amazingly. Everything was very joyful when we stripped off our clothes.”

Verhoeven found his story when he was given American academic Judith C Brown’s book, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, which uses the evidence recorded at the trial of Benedetta and her lover Bartolomea, who the Catholic church charged with immorality in Pescia in 1625.

“I was making a movie about real events. The women themselves told us in the trial what they were doing, even in a sexual way. I did not invent these scenes,” said Verhoeven, adding that he was motivated by wanting to show modern audiences how lesbianism was once deemed impossible.

Birke told the press on Saturday that he saw his main job as avoiding boring his audience: “If one storyline is boring, I like to jump,” he said. “I have ADD, I guess, so I like to jumble tones together. I saw Paul’s movies at an impressionable age, and I try to emulate the amoral calculations his characters make.”

The film’s producer, Saïd Ben Saïd, acknowledged that the film is dividing audiences and described it as “an experimental film” on a big budget.

Brown, on whose book and research the film is based and who has seen the script, said:

“My worries about violence against women focus on the demeaning comments that the most recent former president of the US repeatedly made against women and on the threats current leaders of his party continue to make against women politicians of the opposite party, calling them witches, and encouraging violence against them. The public is more influenced by these present-day actions than by a film about a 17th-century nun.”

Efira argued that Benedetta is a feminist work as it allows the female characters to be ambiguous. “I like the idea that Benedetta does not really lie. I am not sure that people who manipulate others are aware that they lie. It is pathological,” she said, adding that she appreciates Verhoeven’s “lighthearted” approach, where “things aren’t taken too seriously”.

Daphne Patakia, who plays Bartolomea, said she was drawn to the screenplay because “there is not a single normal scene”, and explained that Verhoeven had made the sexual content of the film clear to her when they first met, detailing how it would be shot.

The film also stars Charlotte Rampling as the abbess that Benedetta deposes. Rampling, a colonel’s daughter from Cambridge, is, much like the film festival, no stranger to scandal. She became famous for her sexually explicit roles in films such as 1974’s The Night Porter, in which she dressed in black Nazi regalia to have sex with Dirk Bogarde’s character, her former concentration camp doctor. She was also once criticised by the Catholic church for setting up home with two men, who she claimed she was simply sharing a flat with. “I’ve never had any trouble attracting publicity,” she once said. “True, false, half-true, it sort of follows me around like a cheap perfume.”

At the age of 75, thanks to Benedetta, the actor is back at the centre of a row about morality.

• This article was amended on 12 July 2021 to remove some repeated text.