Davies’ final film is a beautifully made, deeply sad, exploration of the long-term impact of trauma

Director: Terence Davies

Cast: Jack Lowden (Siegfried Sassoon), Peter Capaldi (Older Siegfried Sassoon), Simon Russell Beale (Robbie Ross), Jeremy Irvine (Ivor Novello), Kate Phillips (Hester Gatty), Gemma Jones (Older Hester Gatty), Ben Daniels (Dr Rivers), Calam Lynch (Stephen Tennant), Anton Lesser (Older Stephen Tennant), Tom Blyth (Glen Byam Shaw), Matthew Tennyson (Wilfred Owen), Geraldine James (Theresa Thornycroft), Richard Goulding (George Sassoon), Lia Williams (Edith Sitwell), Julian Sands (Chief Medical Officer)

Few generations carried scars as deep as that which saw millions of their fellows mown down in the endless bloody slaughter of World War One. For us, whatever understanding of the horrors of that conflict we have is often filtered through the war poets, who fought in unimaginable conditions. Terence Davies’ final film explores the life of Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden, ageing into Peter Capaldi) whose life never escaped the shadow of those terrible sights and awful losses.

Benediction is a sombre, mellow, deeply sad portrait of a man who spent a lifetime searching for something, anything to fill the void the war had left in him. Following Sassoon’s life in a series of tableaux-style scenes that mix poetry reading, period music, news footage with flash-forwards to the tetchy, weary older man he will become, it’s a sad, reflective work that presents memory as a sort of prison that consigns everyone to a life sentence. Davies catches this beautifully in his stately, melancholic film where survival guilt goes hand in hand with bitter regret at missed opportunities.

It opens with Sassoon’s protest against the war – denouncing its content from his first-hand experience. Saved from the possibility of a firing squad by influential friends (chief among them, Simon Russell Beale’s good-natured Robbie Ross) Sassoon is dispatched to an Edinburgh military hospital to “recuperate”. There he meets and falls in love with the sensitive, shy poet Wilfrid Owen (Matthew Tennyson), a love he is scared to confess. After Owen is killed, Sassoon commits himself to a series of romantic relationships with selfish, bitchy men including Ivor Novello (a marvellously supercilious Jeremy Irvine, whose eyes are stone cold) and the shallow, vain Stephen Tennent (Calam Lynch, full of Bright Young Thing smugness, turning into a lonely, tragic Anton Lesser). As an older man, he converts to Catholicism and struggles to understand his son George (Richard Goulding).

Davies’ film posits a Sassoon who never recovered from grief at the death of Wilfrid Owen and could never truly forgive himself for being too timid to express his feelings. Davies films Sassoon and Owen in scenes that sing of unspoken intimacy, from an overhead shot of a swimming pool dip that feels like a pirouette, to the matching body language they exhibit while sitting watching a variety show at the hospital. They laugh and dance together, but at parting Sassoon cannot move himself beyond a tightly clasped handshake and a whispered urge to stay a few minutes longer.

In discussions with his doctor and friend Rivers (a lovely tender cameo from Ben Daniels), Sassoon tearfully talks of his fear of expressing his own emotions. Perhaps this, coupled with his self-blame, is why Sassoon placed himself in so many relationships with such transparently flamboyant shits? Davies certainly seems to suggest so: Sassoon had less fear of “being himself” when he was with arrogantly confident men like Novello and Tennant. Did he also, the film suggests, feel so crippled with regret and survivor guilt, that he couldn’t believe himself worthy of the love of gentle, decent men, such as the Owen-like Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth).

Sassoon becomes a man who can never fully escape the never-ending hurt of memories. Even as an older man, Davies shows Capaldi’s Sassoon sitting in his garden, the background replaced by news footage of slaughter in the trenches. It’s mixed in with the shame Sassoon felt at his “stand” against the war being, in the end, a moment that changed nothing. Davies further paints his poetry as declining post-war, as if parts of his creative life never survived the shocks he experienced.

And always he hopes something might make him whole again. Sassoon races through these false dawns during the film: relationships with men, marriage to Hetty (Kate Phillips as the younger Hetty is nearly as oppressed with unspoken sadness as Sassoon), the birth of his son – all fail to deliver. So as an older man – in a neat CGI transition during a 360 camera move – Davies transforms Lowden to Capaldi as he tries Catholicism (there is another wonderful cut that takes us from young Sassoon’s silver military cross being dropped into a river, that transitions into the grey-suited older Sassoon lying in a crucifix position on the floor of a church).

But the tragedy of Benediction – and there is no denying it’s a deeply sad and even slightly depressing film – is none of these attempts fill his soul. The older Sassoon – sharp, prickly and with a stare that goes on and on from Capaldi – snaps at things he doesn’t understand, cruelly dismisses the older Tennant and bitterly complains at the lack of recognition his later work received. He’s a man desperate for companionship, but comfortable only on his own.

It’s particularly sad having seen the brighter, passionate and warm man he was. Much of Benediction succeeds due to an exceptional performance by Jack Lowden. Lowden brilliantly conveys Sassoon’s lingering depression and loss under the surface of every interaction. The cheery wit that covers the self-loathing that leads him into destructive relationships and painful situations is as well captured as the self-deceiving optimism he had that everything could be different. Lowden ends the film with an extraordinary emotional moment – filmed in tight one-shot by Davies – where we see, one the last day of the war, his impossible burdens lead him to a single, quiet, emotional outburst of the vast reams of pain that then continued to burn inside him for the rest of his life.

Benediction is about guilt, loss, regret and denying yourself opportunities at happiness and joy through an internal determination that it is not for you. There is something profoundly personal in this – Sassoon’s life in this film, mirroring many of the regrets Davies spoke of in his own life – a fact increased by the heartfelt, gentle construction of the film with its melancholic air and rich sense of empathy for its subject. As a final work, it’s a fitting tribute to both the poet and its director.