Seven Veils (2025) Review: A coalesce of opera and life

An opera director with a hidden past accepts a role to direct her late mentor’s prominent work for a production of Strauss’ Salomé. The combination of film director, Atom Egoyan’s love for opera, infused with the stupendous performance by Amanda Seyfried as she navigates the role of an opera director, is dexterously portrayed in this movie.  Reuniting with his ‘Chloe’ star while revisiting a version of ‘Salomé’, wherein the protagonist battles her inner demons while channelling her creativity, Egoyan, as Canada’s proudest filmmaker, doesn’t disappoint.

The plot revolves around Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried), an obscure opera director who steps into the shoes of her late mentor and former partner, Charles, to direct the opera ‘Salomé’ at the Canadian Opera Company production. As a little girl, her father had filmed her while she performed the opera in a secluded forest. Later, as a 20-year-old protégé and love interest of Charles, he used her unsettling childhood video performance of Salomé and her creepy father-daughter relationship as the base for his production of the opera. Betrayed by both these men who played pivotal roles in her life, she promises to make ‘minor changes’ to her version of Salomé.

In a deliberate attempt to make sense of a myriad of emotions, Egoyan draws parallels between Jeanine and Salomé. Both were sexualized and exploited by their respective fathers in a despicable act, but this enabled the enamoured heroines to connect with the men they desired.

The clash of the current nature of sexual politics and creative vision is greatly visible throughout the movie, especially during Jeanine’s version of the promiscuous ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’.

In a way, Jeanine, like Salomé, is in pursuit of salvaging her sense of control, while colliding with various men hindering her quest for creative freedom and happiness.

Jeanine navigates the quirkiness of self-introspection while watching her mentor’s production videos, speaking to him while surrounded by family photos of somebody else’s family. Although she knows she will never achieve with the vocalists in the current production the crazy rapture that Charles managed to attain, she doesn’t give up.

Salomé intended to kiss the severed head of John the Baptiste, to prove to herself that she is worthy of being loved. Mirroring the fact that Salomé went that far out to secure the object of her desire, Egoyan’s Jeanine does the same in her quest to remount the best opera production of Salomé. Will she succeed?

Concomitantly, Jeanine, who recently separated from her husband, observes through frequent video calls as her dementia-stricken-mother’s young caregiver (Maia Jae Bastidas) and her estranged husband begin to sleep around. At one point, it culminates with her mother commenting nonchalantly, “You think they are fooling around?” Despite her dementia, her mother is capable of resonating that Harold, Jeanine’s father, “loved her too much”.

This is a fictional feature film, not an opera movie, cleverly set during opera rehearsals and is filmed on the Canadian Opera Company stage and rehearsal rooms in Toronto. The most impressive aspect is unquestionably how Egoyan skilfully incorporated personally shot footage from earlier COC productions to give this new movie the scope of a true stage performance. Additionally, he filmed this movie while remounting the opera production for the seventh time! That is, he simultaneously directed the movie and the opera basically in a period of two weeks!

To conclude, ‘Seven Veils’ turns out to be an intriguing movie about appropriation—not from a cultural perspective, but personal, wherein an artist rediscovers a morally murky realm by using their past trauma to turn something into gold. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. Love is a better taste. Thereby, theoretically, as per this film, Salomé’s fate is reclaimed.