Review: Seven Veils (2023)

There’s a shot early in Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils where Amanda Seyfrield’s opera director Jeanine walks onto the stage during a rehearsal while footage of a small girl in the woods is projected onto the backdrop. Jeanine walks forward until her silhouette consumes the figure of the girl on the screen. In this moment, visually, symbolically, emotionally, Jeanine and the girl become one and the same. The shot epitomizes Egoyan’s artistic viewpoint in Seven Veils, perhaps even the artistic viewpoint of his entire career: that art will always reveal our innermost struggles, whether we want it to or not.

Egoyan’s films, most famously Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter—which are among the best Canadian films ever made—are about emotional revelations, trauma, and insecurity revealed through artifice. Emotional connections are almost always mediated, whether through conversations with Ian Holm’s insurance adjuster in The Sweet Hereafter or the economic relationship between Bruce Greenwood’s mournful father and the young prostitute he adores in Exotica. Seven Veils may not reach the heights of those films—whether it’s a true success as a standalone work of art is an open question—but it’s unmistakably the work of the same filmmaker as those films.

Seven Veils explores the accidental revelations that come with the messy business of making art. Jeanine is remounting a production of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, which tells the story of the young woman in the Gospels who got her stepfather, King Herod, to behead John the Baptist. The opera is famously violent and lurid and reimagines the biblical story as one of unrequited love, with Salome so yearning for John the Baptist that the only way to kiss his lips is to do so with his lifeless, detached head. It’s full of grotesque imagery, beautiful music, and emotions that make perfect sense on the theatrical stage, and less so in a less heightened environment, like a realist play or the conventional approach of a contemporary Hollywood movie.

Seven Veils takes an operatic approach in parts, with large emotions, aggressive symbolic subtext, a stylized manner of performance, and a propensity to tackle its ideas head on. Realism, this is not. Rather, Seven Veils is a personal film about an artist’s inability to reconcile the foundation of her success as an artist with her own personal trauma as they both come from the same root.

For you see, the production of Salome that Jeanine is remounting is not her own. It’s that of her late mentor, and is a final duty of obligation to fulfill his will. But her mentor was not just her mentor. We get the sense he was also her lover, and likely her abuser: he was her maestro and her monster. Jeanine owes her success to him, but that success is poisoned. He’s not the only monster in her life, however, as we see flashbacks to the twisted relationship with her father, whose adoration for his daughter crossed many lines. The footage he filmed of her in the woods, attempting to capture her beauty as an adolescent, resembles the footage of the girl Salome in the woods in the opera. So Jeanine and the girl truly are one and the same.

Seven Veils follows Jeanine during the rehearsals of Salome, watching her process her own issues, which are mediated through the opera itself. The film takes full advantage of the formidable actress that Amanda Seyfried has become (whom Egoyan already collaborated with on his 2009 erotic thriller, Chloe), often sitting in closeup on her face, watching her process things, waiting for her large, expressive eyes to light up and usher us into the next emotional breakthrough that Jeanine would rather not endure. The opera dredges up her old demons and we’re there to witness Jeanine process all these messy emotions. All the while, she’s dealing with a separation from her husband (Mark O’Brien) and a messy professional relationship with the prop master (Rebecca Liddiard), who happens to be an old fling.

The plotting is melodrama, which is fitting of an opera, and the dramatic confrontations have the sort of stylistic awkwardness in moments that is indicative of late Egoyan. But it’s also riveting, especially when you bring the metatext into account. For the production that Jeanine is remounting at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto is not actually her mentor’s; in reality it’s Egoyan’s, which he remounted in 2023 after its initial production in 1995. Egoyan took advantage of the remount to shoot a movie behind the scenes. When we see the opera being performed, it’s the real opera that Egoyan directed at the Four Seasons Centre on Queen Street. When we hear Jeanine express her thoughts about the opera, we are likely actually hearing Egoyan’s thoughts in more ways than one; he wrote the dialogue, but he also produced the staging we’re seeing, the calibrations of the operatic performances, the symbolic approach to the material.

Thus, Egoyan aligns himself with Jeanine’s mentor, the artist as monster haunting the character, but also with Jeanine herself, which makes Seven Veils a fascinating example of art as self expression, whether we like that expression or not. It’s a messy, bold film that doesn’t entirely coalesce, but rivets from moment to moment, largely as a result of the simmering extratextual context that underlines each moment. Every encounter has its symbolic meaning. Every emotional staging has its fascinating meta element. As storytelling, Seven Veils leaves one somewhat unsatisfied. As self expression, it could hardly feel more vital.

7 out of 10

Seven Veils (2023, Canada)

Written and directed by Atom Egoyan; starring Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith, Mark O’Brien, Vinessa Antoine.

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