Seven Veils

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter”) directs his interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s Salome with “Seven Veils.” The film is impactful with strong performances from the lead actors. It has a surreal edge, borrowing from David Lynch and Kafka, with vampires and zombie stories. While it suffers from a lack of surprise and punch at the end, the film retains its sumptuous visual charge and makes a fine edition to the canon of literary films.

A rattled theater director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is very, very nervous. She is away from her husband Paul (Mark O’ Brien), and her mother (Lynne Griffin) has severe Alzheimer’s.

No one seems to be following Janine‘s direction and she learns that her leading man, who plays John The Baptist (Michael Kupfer-Radecky), has sexually assaulted Clea (Rebecca Liddiard). Things go haywire from there. During the projected stage sequences, Jeanine sees herself sexually objectified and abused by her father. An eerie family portrait right out of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” solidifies the truth: her father was a kind of monster. She consequently orders her father’s portrait to be blotted out and dad becomes a carnivorous Casper the ghost, in parallel to King Herod (Michael Schade).

Jeanine becomes tense and haggard, her world unspooling before her in a Lynchian nightmare. She attempts to achieve catharsis by going on a podcast, but the host is patronizing, leading her on with inappropriate questions.

The best scenes feature Seyfried contorted and spastic driven to capture Salome’s bloodlust, even though she is driven to near madness. 

Jeanine is Victor Frankenstein watching her creations come to life onstage while phantoms of memory ravage her mind and body. The filmed staged sequences have an abstract quality illuminated by a saturnine moon of deep blue, while aggressive shapes lumber ahead, black, and monstrous.

The film lacks the Orientalist quality of Ken Russell’s “Salome’s Last Dance” (1988), but it still retains a disquieting tone in keeping with much of Egoyan’s work. The alarm of surprise is not to be found here, but there is something eerie and fetishist in the repetition of blood, lips, and clusters of black, flowing hair. 

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com