After a flurry of films with 2011’s The Deep Blue Sea, 2015’s Sunset Song, and 2016’s A Quiet Passion, British director Terence Davies is finally back this year with Benediction. Capturing the life of World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, starring Jack Lowden, he was known for his epic, satirical poems detailing trench warfare and the horrors of a war in which he fought bravely but spoke out against. He was also a closeted gay man in Britain, where those in power considered his sexual identity a crime. The U.K. trailer has now dropped ahead of a release there while we’re awaiting a U.S. release from Roadside Attractions.
C.J. Prince said in his review, “Time is everything in a Terence Davies film. In Benediction, his biopic about English poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden), he eventually covers his subject’s marriage to Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips). There’s a shot of the couple standing still, facing the camera as they pose for a wedding photo (a shot that tends to pop up throughout the director’s filmography). The camera flashes, we see the black-and-white photo, and then a fade transitions us to the future, where it rests on their bedside while Hester looks at their newborn child. The sequence is an encapsulation of what Davies does best: observing life with one’s head facing backwards, the cumulative weight of the past bearing down on every moment of the present.”
See the trailer and poster below via Empire.
Benediction arrives in the spring in the UK and Ireland and is awaiting a U.S. release date from Roadside Attractions.