Seven Veils

Atom Egoyan has brought cinematic tropes to productions for the Canadian Opera Company since he first mounted Richard Strauss’s Salome in 1996 (a staging that’s been revived several times since). Here he brings Salome to the cinema with a typically layered, “Atom-ique” approach to the story of a young theatre director (Amanda Seyfried) tasked with remounting the opera according to the bequest of her late mentor and lover, whose original interpretation was inspired by her disturbing relationship with her father.

“Seven Veils” is right: Egoyan’s movies are often structured as psychological striptease, revealing taboo and trauma through a fractured mirror of erotic connection, performance, confession and confrontation. In that sense this is unmistakably an Egoyan film — his critical reputation may ebb and flow but for all its high art trappings ultimately Seven Veils sits squarely beside the likes of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter. That said, there are lashings of Strauss and Oscar Wilde here too, butting against very modern ideas around sexual propriety, abuse and catharsis.

A wildly ambitious, visually intoxicating reinterpretation of the Richard Strauss opera, Salome.

Michael Rechtshaffen, Hollywood Reporter

A fascinating film about appropriation – not cultural but personal, the morally dubious territory in which the artist takes your trauma and spins it into gold.

Kate Taylor, Globe and Mail

A marriage of dramaturgy and remembrance, Seven Veils dances through its themes and character history with thoughtful intention that would impress Salome herself. Emotionally bracing and infused with a meta-text that leapfrogs the story and the characters themselves, it is almost good enough to lose one’s head over. [A-]

Warren Cantrell, The Playlist