Dir: Terence Davies. Starring: Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeremy Irvine, Calam Lynch, Tom Blyth, Kate Phillips. 12A, 137 minutes.
“Pain is not the only terror,” laments the war poet Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction. But these agonies are nameless to him and, in Terence Davies’s film about his life, we spend a great deal of time fruitlessly trying to put words to his sadness. Benediction isn’t a cradle-to-grave biopic, nor does it dramatise a single, pivotal event. It’s one man’s breathless search, careening back and forth through the chapters of his life in search of something concrete and true. It’s beautiful, but only in the way it tends to its tragedies with such care.
