The Cinematheque

“Benediction is an expansive movie of loss, isolation, and horror; it’s an energizing and inspiring movie about the vanity of existence itself … The film brings the past to life with a vividness and an immediacy that seem wrenched from Davies’s very soul.”

Richard Brody, “Best Movies of the Year” (#1), The New Yorker

Terence Davies once said he made every feature film thinking it might be his last. Benediction is an artist’s biography, a bitterly tinged chronicle of romance, and an account of anti-war refusal; it is also a tantalizing mirror that at times resembles a self-portrait. The poet Siegfried Sassoon is seen in two characterizations: as a pacifist and member of the most privileged class of gay artists in post-WWI Britain, played by Jack Lowden; and as an alienated late convert to Catholicism in the early 1960s, played by Peter Capaldi. The film moves around these two points in time, integrating both the formal portrait style of Davies’s early work and the distantly observed melodrama of his later period. The film goes beyond both biography and autobiography to demonstrate art’s capacity to recreate experience, in a way that both preserves and totally effaces its source. The resonance between life imagined, suffered, and fantastically recalled is tragically sublime.

“Davies presents the events of Sassoon’s life as layered rather than sequential … At times, the [film] feels startlingly swift as one recollection transforms into another, linked by a sudden gesture or an uttered word.”

Kelley Dong, MUBI Notebook

“[Unlike] Davies’s earlier films, such as The Long Day Closes or Distant Voices, Still Lives, in which every sequence appears on a hieratic plane, with Benediction the moments that float above the plane of memory and experience increasingly dominate the film as it goes along.”

Josh Cabrita, Cinema Scope

“The final image of what is now, unfathomably, his final feature expresses a sadness that’s too much to bear—and it feels apt for a filmography in which the world could be overwhelming in its cruelty.”

Michael Koresky, Sight and Sound