IN a rather quiet week at the multiplex, Terrance Davies’ indie drama Benediction is likely the biggest release.

This is the Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi fronted biopic about the life of GCSE staple war poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Lowden (War & Peace) and Capaldi (Doctor Who) each play Sassoon, with the pair playing junior and senior respectively in a largely torrid and woeful life.

Benediction is a desperately sad feature and Davies pulls no punches in his mission to commiserate.

If, at times, the film’s grim tone verges on the excess, its fine performances and artistic merit do well to pull things back.

Driven by patriotic duty and youthful naivety, Sassoon had already signed up and embedded himself in the Sussex Yeomanry by the time Britain declared war on August 4th, 1914.

Two years of immense bravery and inspirational acts followed. By July 1916, Sassoon was not simply a war hero but a recipient of the Military Cross. A year later, everything had changed.

And here is where Benediction makes its first stride.

Following a spell of convalescent leave, Sassoon declined to return to the front.

As the film depicts, it was a former love of Oscar Wilde, Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale), who convinced military command not to pull Sassoon before a Court Marshall but instead to steal him away for psychiatric treatment.

Working from a self-penned script, Davies explores hereafter the shame of a man whose stand against the conduct of war met so swift a conclude.

Added to this is the turmoil of sexual repression.

Sassoon’s string of secret affairs with men plays out here alongside a relentlessly bleak imagining of his marriage to Hester Gatty (Kate Philips, then Gemma Jones).

There are roles here too for Ben Daniels, Geraldine James, and Anton Lesser, while Jeremy Irvine, Matthew Tennyson and Lia Williams appear in variable “celebrity” cameos as Ivor Norvello, Wilfred Owen and Edith Sitwell.

For the most part, however, Benediction is not the sort of biopic to revel in frivolous name dropping.

Likewise, while interesting - perhaps even alarming - CGI is memorably used here, this is a film more concerned with that which cannot be seen.

Benediction will not be for everyone but fans of Davies’ early shorts - the Children to Death trilogy - may enjoy thematic continuation and development. It’s that sort of a film.