Benediction

Terence Davies made ten features in forty years and died in 2023. Benediction, which premiered at Toronto in 2021, was his penultimate film and the one that most closely resembles a self-portrait: a study of a gay man of enormous talent who spent his life among people who found him difficult and never quite forgave himself for anything.

Jack Lowden plays Sassoon from the trenches onwards — the Military Cross thrown in the Mersey, the declaration against the war read into the Commons, the months at Craiglockhart with Wilfred Owen. Then the twenties: Ivor Novello, played by Jeremy Irvine as a monster of charm; Stephen Tennant and the bright young people; the epigrams that Davies writes with real relish. Peter Capaldi plays Sassoon in old age, converted to Catholicism and thoroughly disappointed. Davies intercuts archive footage of the war throughout, and reads the poetry over it in voiceover.

Critics were near-unanimous, and the film holds a 93% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. What distinguishes it from the usual literary biopic is Davies's refusal to make the wit a consolation: the drawing-room scenes are funny and then abruptly cold, and the film argues that a generation was taught to convert grief into style and then had to live with the exchange rate.