Benediction, review: the anguished, sensual life of Siegfried Sassoon

It’s hard to imagine a Terence Davies film that’s not deeply personal in some way, but Benediction, his uncompromising new biopic of Siegfried Sassoon, feels like a crowbarring open of the soul. Not since Davies' earliest, most nakedly autobiographical films (Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes) has he delved into the subject of his own sexuality with such candour. What we get here is the story of two wars – the one Sassoon famously refused to go on fighting when the poet wrote his “Soldier’s Declaration” of 1917, and then the one that raged inside him for the rest of his life.

This compellingly bitter film is the summit of Davies’s late style, following two valiant projects – the Scottish pastoral Sunset Song (2015) and his Emily Dickinson portrait A Quiet Passion (2016) – where a sense of strain cramped his artistry. A poet of unhappiness in his own right, Davies has found a fascinating counterpart in Sassoon, whose furious campaign of protest against the First World War gave force and purpose to a literary career that continued in autobiographical mode for another 50 years.

Jack Lowden plays the lead role with phenomenal, clenched feeling, in his deepest and best screen work to date. The film begins with Sassoon’s stand against the conduct of the war, after losing his younger brother Hamo in Gallipoli, and being awarded the Military Cross in 1916, “for conspicuous gallantry”. It was later claimed he threw this decoration disgustedly into the River Mersey.

At Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, he was officially treated for shell shock, but this amounted to de facto incarceration to avoid a court martial. It was here that he formed an intense friendship with Wilfred Owen (a sad-eyed Matthew Tennyson) and was treated by the psychiatrist WHR Rivers (Ben Daniels), the real-life figure at the centre of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, whom Daniels plays with terrific avuncular intelligence. Owen, of course, would be called back to active service, and Sassoon would never see him again: a looming goodbye, handled with choked restraint, which hits with exactly the impact Davies intends.

The poems do a lot of the talking, as scenes from Sassoon’s confinement dissolve mournfully to newsreel footage of trench horrors. Davies’s script is a peach: it’s richly layered, often hilariously catty, and finds room for a host of stellar cameos. Simon Russell Beale is Sassoon’s confidant Robbie Ross, the famous literary executor of Oscar Wilde; Lia Williams sketches a scolding Edith Sitwell, described at one point as an “animated meringue”; and Suzanne Bertish is the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Sassoon’s celebrity in post-war aristocratic circles led to a series of gay liaisons, between which the film flits in a restless, gossipy, and ultimately unhappy way: in the orbit of the lethally narcissistic Ivor Novello (a cutting Jeremy Irvine), he looked for love and usually failed to find it. How the older Sassoon (Peter Capaldi) became such a crabby and shrivelled figure, sitting alone in church pews, is the film’s bleakest question, though his doomed marriage to poor Hester Gatty (a sparkling Kate Phillips, then a broken Gemma Jones) must have had a lot to do with it. The drift of the second half is raggedly despondent, as Lowden’s Sassoon cycles fruitlessly between lovers. It's hard not to be reminded of what Davies has publicly said about how being gay “ruined his life” as a residual Catholic (rather than Sassoon, who converted in 1957).

Benediction’s chilly power hinges on a closing scene, indeed a long and extraordinary last shot, in which Lowden sits on a darkening park bench and Sassoon’s anguish pours out unfettered: he’s been thinking of Owen, and his poem “Disabled” in particular, and the shattering of so many lives, not least his own.

The sheer depth of Sassoon’s personal misery feels like a brutally unfashionable thing for a contemporary film to confront, but Davies, who’s never given a fig about fashion, confronts it head on. There’s nothing about the rage, waste and loneliness he’s willing to sugarcoat – and Sassoon gets very little peace.

12 cert, 137 min. In cinemas now