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Benediction Movie Review

Benediction is a 2022 biographical drama film directed by Terence Davies and starring Jack Lowden in the central role. It’s a flawed, but highly engaging biopic.

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“It’s one of the inconveniences of the shadow life we live in“

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It follows a 20th century war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s life-long quest for personal salvation through his experiences with family, war, his writing, and destructive relationships. This turned out to be a very uneven movie with two distinctly different halves. The first one was incredible while the second one was only okay.

Let’s first state with the positives. The movie begins with the poet’s hardships during WWI. His anti-war stance sent him to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. This first act explores deeply just how difficult it must have been during this period to be a pacifist. Then, the story quickly changes gears and moves into an LGBT drama.

My favorite sequence was the first conversation between Siegfried and his doctor. It turns out that both men are gay and how we get to realize that was beautifully done through subtle mannerisms and sophisticated dialogue. The movie so truthfully depicts the thrill of meeting somebody who is just like yourself in terms of sexuality, especially emphasizing how impactful this meetup must have felt back in this era.

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Jack Lowden’s performance is superb. The final sequence with the long take done on his face where we see his anguish and turmoil and utter sadness was powerful, albeit familiar. He was so good here that he will hopefully receive bigger roles in the future off of this impressive turn. The character worked because we get to see his many facets, and through his doomed romances and a terrible marriage choice, the film became a powerful tragedy of its own.

It’s a shame then that the second half pretty much resorted to this catty drama between Siegfried and his terrible boyfriends. All of them were these obnoxious, toxic bitches who made his life hell, and I guess they were realistic in their portrayals, especially for the time period, but the movie became too soapy in those relationships, no matter how undeniably entertaining all those sequences most definitely were.

Ivor Novello fares the worst. He was a famous entertainer who was also gay, but he was in this movie so easy to hate and so horrible that he threatened to become a soap opera villain at times. Again, all of this was so much fun to watch, but it derailed the power of the much subtler and more profound first half. The scenes with his eventual wife fared better and they were both sweet and tragic at the same time.

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Benediction benefits from excellent editing with the documentarian sections being quite moving. The third act parts with the aged characters did not work out quite as well, but emotionally speaking, this is a very complex, layered story with so many tumultuous feelings and a pensive tone that remained throughout its runtime that is definitely overlong, but the movie was still involving from start to finish. I was never bored with it, which is a huge accomplishment for a biopic. The cinematography and score are two other highlights.