BENEDICTION

FRI 17 JUN 17:30 SAT 18 JUN 12:15 SUN 19 JUN 20:30 MON 20 JUN 15:15 TUE 21 JUN 18:00 WED 22 JUN 15:15 THU 23 JUN 20:30

BOOKING REF

Terence Davies directs the story of English poet, writer and soldier Siegfried Sassoon who was sent to a psychiatric facility for his anti-war stance during WWI. A decorated British soldier in the First World War, Siegfried Sassoon achieved renown as a poet via impassioned anti-war verses that landed him in a military psychiatric hospital; later, he emerged from the closet to live with unusual openness as a gay man amid the Bright Young Things of 1920s London, before retreating into heterosexual marriage and fatherhood, and converting late in life to Catholicism. The dialogue is quietly scathing, and the production values are sumptuous. But Davies seems most interested in Sassoon as a symbol of hemmed-in Englishness whose personal misery the director confronts head on. UK 2022 TERENCE DAVIES 137M