Only the Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan (“Exotica,” “The Sweet Hereafter”) could have made the movie “Seven Veils.” His signature obsessions — the ripple effects of trauma, the use of video as evidence, private anguish played out in public view — pervade every frame.
The film centers on a theater director, Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried), who is remounting a production of Strauss’s opera “Salomé” that she had worked on as a student with a mentor, Charles, who is never seen. The new assignment comes from Charles’s widow, Beatrice (Lanette Ware), who manages the opera company and surely knows that Jeanine and Charles were having an affair back then. What’s more, during the old production, Charles had exploited Jeanine’s experience of childhood abuse, vampirically drawing out her memories of being terrorized by her father and integrating those details into “Salomé.”
The restaging requires Jeanine to faithfully replicate a troubling production while contradictorily making it her own, to expel her demons — all without disclosing her personal stake to the cast. She also has to manage present-day problems, notably a baritone (Michael Kupfer-Radecky) who is a liability around women. There’s more than a hint of self-reflexivity to “Seven Veils,” which incorporates Egoyan’s own remounting of “Salomé” for the Canadian Opera Company from 2023. That production’s singers play fictionalized versions of themselves.
In short, “Seven Veils” offers plenty to think about. But fans who mourn that Egoyan’s dramatic instincts have slipped in recent years won’t quite be getting a return to form. Seyfried in particular seems out of place, and although the apparent miscasting might be intentional (Jeanine, giving an interview to a podcaster, pointedly explains that she is older than she looks), certain plot points and motifs, such as home movies featuring a blindfold and tangerines, approach self-parody.
Seven Veils
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.
