Benediction
Roadside Attractions | Release Date: June 3, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
81
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 32 Critic Reviews
Positive:
30
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
ObserverRex ReedJun 8, 2022
Beautifully designed and photographed, sensitively written and directed by England’s acclaimed Terence Davies, and impeccably acted by a distinguished cast that turns life into art, Benediction is one gorgeous motion picture. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangJun 2, 2022
Benediction, Terence Davies’ achingly beautiful portrait of the English war poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, is a movie of acute sadness and intense pleasure. The pleasure and the sadness are inextricable, which seems fitting, given how closely aesthetic bliss and moral despair were entwined in Sassoon’s own art. Read full review
100
SlashfilmBarry LevittJun 2, 2022
Benediction" is true to its title, offering up a blessing — not to the Church, rather, but to those whose lives were never able to be lived to the fullest. The film is more than a beautifully performed, masterfully directed piece of entertainment. It transcends, offering hope to any person yearning for more. It is in equal turns lively, devastating, funny, hopeful, and heartbreaking. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleMay 31, 2022
Benediction is an awesome combination of wildness and control. Davies is out there all by himself, speaking a cinematic language that is his own and that has little to do with plays or literature. Read full review
100
Little White LiesAdam WoodwardMay 20, 2022
Owen wrote several other poems about the horrors of war before his untimely death in 1920, and there is one which Davies does not feature here whose title nonetheless captures the mournful spirit of his film. It’s called ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubJordan HoffmanMay 31, 2022
There’s nothing about this film that is uplifting, but Davies’ handling of the material is so exquisite that the overbearing melancholy becomes, in the end, a work of poetry. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriJun 3, 2022
To call Benediction a biopic would be giving biopics a bit too much credit. They don’t deserve Benediction. Read full review
90
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeJun 3, 2022
The act of writing has tended to be flagrantly non-cinematic, but with these last two films, Davies proves that the internal life of the mind can indeed be explored and portrayed in a visual medium. With every scene a stanza, Benediction is a lyrical triumph. Read full review
90
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJun 1, 2022
The film brings the past to life with a vividness and an immediacy that seem wrenched from Davies’s very soul. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comOdie HendersonJun 3, 2022
Benediction bears the distinctive stamp of its writer/director, Terence Davies, a man whose films feel more like poetic meditations on moods, emotions, and events than straightforward narratives. It’s as if we are floating above the material, touching down in different places at the filmmaker’s discretion. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineKeith UhlichSep 16, 2021
Terence Davies’s film is a rhapsodic portrayal of an upper-crust milieu in which words are wielded like weapons by people who might otherwise be pariahs. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichSep 13, 2021
This is a film that trembles with a need for redemption that never comes, and the urgency of that search is palpable enough that you can feel it first-hand, even if Benediction is never particularly clear about the nature of the redemption it’s hoping to find. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeMay 22, 2022
Behind it all is an endlessly saddening search for that transformative sacrament evoked by the film’s title – alluring yet elusive. Read full review
80
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyMay 21, 2022
Benediction isn’t a cradle-to-grave biopic, nor does it dramatise a single, pivotal event. It’s one man’s breathless search, careening back and forth through the chapters of his life in search of something concrete and true. It’s beautiful, but only in the way it tends to its tragedies with such care. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeMay 20, 2022
The two performances, rather than playing in a continuum, work as contrasting sides of a fractured psyche. Read full review
80
CineVueChristopher MachellMay 19, 2022
Its quiet visuals are at the heart of Benediction’s sense of dignity and remembrance. Its language is not the passionate rage of Sassoon’s youth, but rather of the quiet, profoundly sad reflections of his later years. Read full review
80
EmpireA.A. DowdMay 17, 2022
Benediction finds both sorrow and hilariously withering wit in the eventful 
life of a famed wartime poet, offering some of the sharpest, nimblest dialogue of writer-director Terence Davies’ estimable career. Read full review
80
Time OutPhil de SemlyenMay 12, 2022
A benediction is a prayer for divine help. For any lover of beautifully crafted cinema with real emotional charge, Davies’s latest will feel a lot like an answer. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyNov 4, 2021
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. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 13, 2021
Benediction is not an easy experience and some of the caustic, brittle dialogue scenes with Sassoon’s celebrity acquaintances are grating – yet deliberately so. The sadness is overwhelming. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleSteve DavisJun 1, 2022
Less adventurous in structure than many in Davies’ oeuvre, Benediction is both expressionistic and vivid in recounting selected particulars of an outwardly fascinating life, though something feels missing in the totality of things. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreJun 8, 2022
For all his “slow cinema” indulgences and patience-testing “patience” as a story teller, the old master Davies, Lowden (“Dunkirk”) and the poet Sassoon mentored make sure Benediction leaves us with an emotional punch that no film this year can match. Read full review
75
Film ThreatAlan NgMay 15, 2022
The narrative is mournful about a man who lived a long tragic life, a dark and depressing tale of young men having to hide their sexual orientation and its emotional and psychological toll in carrying their secret into their senior years. Read full review
75
The Film StageC.J. PrinceSep 13, 2021
The comedy in Benediction is like a spoonful of sugar before Davies brings in the medicine. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorSep 13, 2021
The dialogue is quietly scathing, and the production values are sumptuous. But Davies seems most interested in Sassoon as a symbol of hemmed-in Englishness. As a character, he remains poetically opaque. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJun 2, 2022
The film never quite conjures a link between the life and the work. Read full review
70
Screen DailyWendy IdeSep 13, 2021
It’s an elegant piece of filmmaking, if a little too decorous at times. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 13, 2021
This biographical drama, grounded in the anguished poetry of its protagonist, is hushed and decorous to a fault. But it does eventually wind its way to a profoundly affecting conclusion. Read full review
67
The PlaylistGregory EllwoodSep 14, 2021
Despite Davis’ lyrical direction, the obvious gaps in the screenplay provide too many holes for what strives to be a definitive portrait of an exceptional talent. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyJun 2, 2022
Benediction has at least three things in common with its immediate predecessor, “A Quiet Passion” (2016). Both are biographies of poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Emily Dickinson, respectively. Both are suffused with great feeling. And despite having much to recommend them, both don’t really work. Read full review
60
Screen RantNadir SamaraJun 3, 2022
There is nothing flashy about Davies' style and the found footage doesn’t feel obtuse; it feels imminent. The film sets out to execute a plan and does so without missing a beat. It is rare to extract so much emotion from a mostly technical achievement, but Benediction does just that. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithJun 14, 2022
Mr. Davies’s wit is admirable, but his structure is nonexistent. He devises no problem to be solved, no goal to be met, no riddle to be answered. Occasionally we hear bits of Sassoon’s beautiful war poetry in voiceover, but it is irrelevant to most of the action. Read full review
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