Rating: NR | Runtime: 107 minutes
Release Date: March 7th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Elevation Pictures / XYZ Films / Variance Films
Director(s): Atom Egoyan
Writer(s): Atom Egoyan

I’ve been asked to make this personal.

It’s a Biblical dance at the Feast of Herod given name by Oscar Wilde. King Herod Antipas offers his niece/stepdaughter anything she desires if she’ll dance for his guests on his birthday. She agrees as long as her prize is the head of John the Baptist. The notion of lust is projected upon the tale by Gustave Flaubert’s “gypsy” acrobatics, Aubrey Beardsley’s “belly dance” illustration, and Wilde’s “striptease.” What had been a public performance becomes a private performance for the king alone. From exploitation to objectification to incest. The so-called Seven Veils looms large above the tale’s many incarnations: including Richard Strauss’ 1905 opera Salome.

This is true for Jeanine’s (Amanda Seyfried) remount within Atom Egoyan’s film too. Both because of the character’s history with the legend and the director’s own history with the opera. His staging of Strauss’ work in 1996 put the filmmaker on the opera map and, when asked to lead the latest remount, he decided to make a fictionalized film (with his opera singers, including Ambur Braid and Michael Kupfer-Radecky, playing versions of themselves) about the experience and the politics that surround a controversial piece’s parallel evolution to the eras in which it’s produced. Egoyan knew he couldn’t do the same things he did thirty years prior because the world was too different. He would need to interpret the themes through a new filter and consider how his choices could better suit the material to its audience.

Jeanine must do the same. Wherein Egoyan is thinking abstractly, however, he’s able to channel his thinking through her as a literal vessel. Not only because she’s a woman staging this sexually-charged story, but also because she’s a survivor of the same abuses that story holds at its core. So, despite Jeanine’s selection to head-up this remount being the last wish of her former teacher (who led the original production while she was his student and intern), she did not accept simply to be his dancing puppet after death. While that’s surely what the theater and his wife/artistic director (Lanette Ware’s Beatrice) hoped by reaching out, Jeanine accepted as a means to take back control. To flip the script and behead the misogynistic men who told her to toe their line.

There are many layers to the show as a result. There’s Jeanine’s rendition of the “seven veils” for her father (Ryan McDonald’s Harold) as a child. The theft and grotesquely exaggerated version of that personal history taken by her former mentor to serve as the linchpin of his seminal production. And now her present choice to re-stage the blurred lines between them through her own hindsight and position as their victim. Because it’s always been the director leading the charge from the place of Herod that centers Salome’s beauty and desire as something to be owned. Now, as the person who watched her father and teacher use her in that same way, she can finally center Salome’s pain instead.

From that perspective, Seven Veils is very good. Jeanine is exorcising her demons by confronting her past through her art—wielding this opportunity (rendered crazy by the open secret that her relationship with her teacher was more than professional) as a weapon to ensure some culpability on his part is added to the myth surrounding his acclaim with this specific opera. She’s dealing with these themes on-stage as well as off it considering her video calls home are colored by the injustices of men via the looming specter of her father, the continued gaslighting by her mother (Lynne Griffin), and the blatant infidelity of her husband (Mark O’Brien). Add Jeanine’s own flirtations with the corruptibility of power courtesy of her former classmate (Douglas Smith) being an understudy on this project, and the slope gets slippery.

I only wish Egoyan stuck to his lead and the internal and external impact she possesses because the inclusion of more drama outside her sight line proves a bit much. Yes, there’s a lot of good stuff being mined from the experiences of the show’s prop master Clea (Rebecca Liddiard), but it really feels like a completely different movie considering the only overlap is Jeanine asking her to do something over and thus allowing the crucial piece of this subplot to unfold. It’s more exploitation and misplaced ideas of believing you can capitulate to misogyny as long as you get something out of the bargain. Because the examples are more overt on Clea’s trajectory, though, they can’t help suffering when compared against Jeanine’s more nuanced grappling.

Where Clea’s path does impact the overall story is the end result of what she ultimately decides. Because, while Egoyan is fighting the past as far as how his staging reads to the audience, the present isn’t that much different. Even though both Jeanine (Seyfried is very good in this role) and Clea reject the system and this notion that you must compromise, neither they nor other women benefit. Clea tries to spin what happens to her into a win for her girlfriend, but it’s another man who gets his chance in the spotlight instead. Jeanine seeks to leave her mark while moving past her trauma, but knows her late teacher will get all the praise anyway. It’s two steps forward, one step back since, in the end, Salome’s victory still ends in death.

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Amanda Seyfried in SEVEN VEILS; courtesy of XYZ Films & Variance Films.