By John Corrado

The latest Toronto-set psychodrama from Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, Seven Veils reimagines the opera Salome through the lens of trauma and the #MeToo movement. It’s also perhaps The Sweet Hereafter filmmaker’s strongest late-career effort.

Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is a young theatre director who is hired by the Canadian Opera Company to remount the Richard Strauss opera in honour of her late mentor; a man named Charles, who defined the production years earlier with his own reimagining.

Jeanine is trying to put her own stamp on the production, while reflecting on a teacher-student relationship that may have crossed some lines. The opera, of course, involves Salome performing the dance of the seven veils for her father King Herod, and demanding the severed head of her unrequited lover John the Baptist.

These thematic elements get woven throughout Egoyan’s script, as Jeanine reflects on complicated memories with her own father. Egoyan developed the story while working on his own production of Salome, and much of it takes place during rehearsals at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto. This gives a slight meta bent to the film, which is largely about the push and pull of a director trying to exert some creative control over a project. In true Egoyan fashion, it’s also about how memory and traumatic experiences influence an artist’s creative output.

Jeanine is in charge of directing the show’s leads; Ambur (Ambur Braid) and Johann (Michael Kupfer-Radecky), an intense actor sent from Russia who has a volatile history with his co-stars. She’s also tasked with overseeing their understudies, Rachel (Vinessa Antoine) and Luke (Douglas Smith), who are itching to take over these roles. Then there’s prop designer Clea (Rebecca Liddiard), who is in charge of crafting the disembodied head for the show, and recording social media videos about the process.

Outside the theatre, there is a subplot involving Jeanine’s estranged husband Paul (Mark O’Brien) and her increasingly forgetful mother Margot (Lynne Griffin), whom she interacts with through an iPad. The screen thing can feel like a restricting, COVID-era narrative device. But this storyline still ties into the larger tapestry of themes about memory and family, as Seven Veils touches on a number of hot button topics and intense thematic elements.

The slightly messy storytelling is perhaps a feature in a film about the inherent messiness of the creative process, especially one that involves the purging of hazy, complex memories. If Egoyan’s narrative can feel overstuffed with its various threads and tangents, it’s indicative of the many moving parts behind this complicated production that Jeanine is trying to pull together. And, in an increasingly uneven filmography, Seven Veils still feels like one of Egoyan’s more cohesive modern works. The operatic backdrop also forgives the film some of its more melodramatic flourishes.

Seyfried, in her second (and much stronger) collaboration with Egoyan following Chloe back in 2009, is given a juicy role at the centre of it. She portrays a range of emotions, from internal moments to bigger ones as Jeanine offers direction to her actors. It’s fitting that Seyfried’s performance gets meatier as Jeanine tries to reign in the ones she is directing on stage, and she is a good muse for Egoyan’s own artistic impulses.

Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)

Seven Veils opens exclusively in theatres in limited release on March 7th, including at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto. It’s being distributed in Canada by Elevation Pictures.