Seven Veils

It’s been some years since Amanda Seyfried sung ABBA songs with her mama Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia! or was a mean girl in Mean Girls. She needs a role that shows off her intelligence and maturity as a performer, but unfortunately, director Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils isn’t it. It’s an elegant film that’s quite easy to admire, but it’s a little too cold, too brittle to fully embrace. Nobody is suggesting that Seyfried turns in a bad performance (far from it), and it’s more that she’s a novel choice for a part that doesn’t quite fit her.

Seyfried is Jeanine, tasked with directing a big-budget, large-scale production of the opera Salome in Toronto. It’s a massive task for someone seemingly quite inexperienced, and it turns out that Jeanine was hired to honour the last wishes of her former mentor (with whom she was having an affair). The onstage theatrics mirror those behind the scenes as Jeanine navigates her way through competing versions of reality.

Egoyan creates many subtle starts of tension, introducing various occurrences and subplots intended to make Jeanine’s experience even more taut. It’s really quite effective, aided by a jazzy, enigmatic score from composer Mychael Danna. The whole film is reasonably effective, although it doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny. Seyfried’s character isn’t quite infantilised, but definitely patronised, and it’s a little odd that someone this naive and untried would be given such a high-profile gig. Jeanine isn’t passive as such, but she deserves more agency.

Seven Veils certainly looks tasteful, but the movie poses a few questions that it was unable to answer. A number of resolutions are indistinctive, and simply following through on a few secondary plot points would have given Jeanine’s character (and her actions) more substance. As each veil is removed, it becomes more apparent that the film doesn’t have as much at its core as first assumed.

Oliver Johnston

Seven Veils does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Berlin Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

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