Amanda Seyfried Deftly Fuses Art and Trauma in Operatic Seven Veils
Director Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils has such a convoluted inspiration to it, and such deeply metaphorical and literal ties to its own filmmaker’s history, that it’s difficult to do its meta-layers justice in the span of a concise description. Suffice to say, the Strauss opera Salome–itself an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s French play–has been intertwined through the Armenian-Canadian director’s career. He first directed the opera in 1996, and wrote Seven Veils as a psychological drama taking place during another staging of the opera, to be filmed partially backstage during a remounting of his own real world version of Salome, featuring some of the same performers he first cast almost 30 years earlier. So too is the film about the remounting of an influential opera, and the pressures of adaptation/expectation vs. the freedom for creative alteration. And even the story of Seven Veils then revolves around stripping away the boundaries between the artform and the emotion–and painful trauma–that powers it. The whole thing becomes an endless ouroboros, as life imitates art, which imitates life, which imitates art … on and on forever. It’s a heady rush, trying to imagine Salome the way Egoyan no doubt sees it, so imbued with almost supernatural meaning.
Yet somehow, through all these layers, a more or less cohesive narrative manages to coalesce, fed in dribs and drabs to the audience through the skilled performance of its focal point: Amanda Seyfried, reunited with Egoyan years after 2009 erotic thriller Chloe. Here she’s portraying director Jeanine, no doubt a proxy for Egoyan in some respects, while also confronting her own personal and professional demons that are bound within the trappings of the same opera.
Jeanine has been tapped to direct this remounting of Salome that was initially directed years earlier by her mentor Charles, a man of great influence and force of personality, with whom it seems Jeanine was previously having an affair. The task has taken her away from her family–daughter and husband Paul (Mark O’Brien), who she suspects is also having a fling with the caretaker for her dementia-suffering mother. Simultaneously, Jeanine is needled by the legacy of both Charles and her traumatic memories of her theater-loving father, who pushed her in the direction of the dramatic arts as a child even as it’s implied he was sexually abusive toward her. Hints and imagery tied to this abuse were sprinkled throughout the version of Salome first put together by her confidant Charles, which only compounds Jeanine’s stress and anxiety as she revisits them. She is tasked with preserving “his version” of the opera, culled at least in part from her story.
This push-pull battle for recognition, credit and acknowledgement is a major theme of Seven Veils, as Jeanine is so often looking to subtly evolve aspects of the production–whether to embrace or distance her own experience isn’t always clear–only to be told by producers and financiers that deviations from Charles’ version won’t be tolerated. There’s a palpable sense of resentment present, directed at Jeanine by both her would-be backers and performers like the conceited and pushy Johann (real opera baritone Michael Kupfer-Radecky), an implication that she doesn’t deserve the position and has somehow earned it through her prior intimate relationship with the deceased Charles. She’s told to make the show “personal,” but stymied at each step of trying to be vulnerable in offering up her personal experience.
At the same time, though, Jeanine also recoils from those same elements of her trauma that have permeated the telling of Salome, or the associated shame of seeing other people with some inkling of what may have happened to her when she was young. In these moments, Seven Veils feels like it’s meant to be verging into psychological thriller territory, but in truth it never really gets there. One expects this kind of “woman facing mounting stress” narrative to build to a crescendo resulting in either grand catharsis and even healing (unlikely though it may be), or a catastrophic collapse that would see Jeanine overwhelmed by the intensity of the unearthed trauma and crumble in a huge public outburst. And yet, she never actually takes on the mantle of a Roman Polanski-like psych case–Seven Veils opts for a more measured, realistic and less expected, low-key middle road. Perhaps ironically, it dramatizes the events on stage arguably more than Jeanine’s ultimate processing of her own experience. It revels in the opera itself, in the text and music of it–you don’t often see a film where “theater geeks” are the single most appropriate demographic for marketers to target, but this would be one.
All the same, Seven Veils is often quite effectively unnerving in its character-to-character interactions, whether that’s Jeanine being interviewed by a confrontational podcaster who seems to know every bit of the shame she thought was largely secret, or the intense process of being given notes and instruction by someone who doesn’t truly believe in your ability to handle the task you’ve been given. Seyfried carries the film on her back, in what is really quite a meaty role–we spend the majority of our time with her, and her strained expression and pale, famished look speaks to the psychic toll that digging into her past is having. The only other real character of note beyond Jeanine is Clea the props master, warmly played by Canadian actress Rebecca Liddiard but feeling as if she hails from a different film more grounded in reality rather than heady metaphor. Clea’s #MeToo adjacent subplot ends up falling somewhat flat as a result, indicative of some of the frayed subplots of Seven Veils that ultimately steal a bit of momentum from Seyfried’s central performance by not being dynamic enough to justify the diversion. One can understand Eogyan wanting to use Clea’s experience as a springboard for interrogating abuse of power and complicity in the arts, but it feels like material that could easily have become the basis of its own central narrative, rather than occupying the fringes of what is otherwise Jeanine’s story.
There is a sense that Seven Veils doesn’t always know exactly what it intends to be; a drama with some curiosity about being a thriller, but not the conviction to fully see that transformation through. What it unabashedly is, and what no one can take away, is an earnest celebration of the theater art form and of Salome itself, in a way that few other films have replicated. Most screenplays set during the production of an opera would be using the theater for its opulent visuals, or using the opera itself as a backdrop for music and access to the bombastic personalities that fill the theatrical space. The show would ultimately be fairly incidental. But Seven Veils genuinely venerates the opera, rooting itself in the act of interpreting a show that has been done hundreds of times before, mining down into the dark in an attempt to unearth a part of that story that is personal to you, whether or not you’re even aware that’s what you’re doing. At times, that makes for a film that loses itself in Egoyan’s layers of meta-metaphor, but the steadying presence of Seyfried keeps it from venturing too far into avant-garde opaqueness. Lovers of classical opera will no doubt find it to be a sumptuous treat.
Director: Atom Egoyan
Writer: Atom Egoyan
Stars: Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith, Mark O’Brien, Vinessa Antoine, Ambur Braid, Michael Kupfer-Radecky
Release date: March 7, 2025
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.