Following its premiere back at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, Atom Egoyan’s latest film Seven Veils is finally getting a U.S. release. The Amanda Seyfried-led thriller set behind the scenes of the opera world will open on March 7 via XYZ Films and Variance and now the new trailer has arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “After years away, theater director Jeanine (Academy Award® nominee Amanda Seyfried) re-enters the opera world to stage her former mentor’s most famous work. Haunted by dark and disturbing memories from her past, Jeanine allows her repressed trauma to color the present as her personal and professional lives begin to unravel. Renowned director Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) reunites with Seyfried in this visually stunning, propulsive work, filmed on location during the staging of Egoyan’s acclaimed production of ‘Salome.'”
Ethan Vestby said in his TIFF review, “You have to hand it to Atom Egoyan: no matter how many flops he’s accrued, he won’t chase trends. While his new film Seven Veils positions itself in the high-definition now––family zoom calls, iPhone-captured showbiz misconduct, or the most disingenuous line-delivery of the word “podcast” ever––the Canadian director’s latest feels like his millionth variation on “trauma mediated through a low-res video camera.” Though not so much another of his small-scale thrillers as it is Hitchcock’s Marnie meets Tár, an odyssey through the power dynamics of a hoity-toity creative world colliding with sexual trauma. Made concurrently with Egoyan’s own stint staging the opera Salome in Toronto this past winter, the film is nothing if not interesting for being an example of a director racing to put together a movie that grafts his usual preoccupations onto a quickly available business opportunity.”
“Salome is a production I’ve done a number of times so when I knew that the Canadian Opera Company was remounting it, I thought this would be an ideal time to fuse the opera singers I knew they had booked with the script I had written,” Egoyan tells Deadline. “I wanted to explore how the themes of Salome could weave with the story of remounting this particular production. It’s not really an opera movie, it’s just using the world of the opera as a workplace like any workplace. We see the characters as they float in and out of scenes dealing with the preparation of the opera.”
See the trailer below.