137 min | PG-13 | June 3, 2022 | Roadside Attractions
Siegfried Sassoon walks out of the First World War a decorated hero and a poet who hates the war that made him one. Terence Davies follows him through decades of glittering, loveless rooms as he searches for an absolution no one can give. The war ends. The penance never does.
Siegfried Sassoon survives the First World War and never forgives himself for it. He returns a decorated officer and a war poet who publicly denounces the slaughter the brass keeps feeding men into. The army declares him shell-shocked rather than court-martial a hero. Benediction follows him out of the trenches and into decades of brittle drawing rooms, doomed affairs, and a late conversion to Catholicism. Terence Davies builds the whole film around one question. A man who lived when better men died spends the rest of his life looking for absolution and finds that no one can grant it.
Jack Lowden plays the young Sassoon with a wounded reserve that curdles into cruelty. He wants tenderness and punishes himself for needing it. Jeremy Irvine plays Ivor Novello as a vain, glittering charmer who treats devotion as a game. Calam Lynch plays Stephen Tennant as pure decadent surface, beautiful and hollow. Simon Russell Beale gives Robbie Ross the warmth the film otherwise withholds. Peter Capaldi takes over as the older Sassoon and plays him as a man hardened into bitterness, snapping at a wife and son who cannot reach him.
Davies writes and directs, and the film carries his signature method. He cuts the staged drama against archival footage of the real war. Soldiers march and fall while Sassoon’s verse reads over the images in voiceover. The juxtaposition strips the period costume drama of its comfort. The interwar scenes sit in cool, static, composed frames that hold while the dialogue cuts like a blade. The wit is theatrical and sharp, and Davies stages it as armor, a way these people defend themselves against feeling anything true.
This is the last film Davies completes, and it works as a summation. He returns to his lifelong subjects. Faith, repression, the weight of memory, and the impossibility of peace for a man who cannot stop replaying his own survival. The film denies the redemption arc it sets up. Sassoon converts and finds nothing. The final image lands as a benediction the title promises and the man never receives.