“Benediction,” Terence Davies’ exquisitely beautiful depiction of Siegfried Sassoon, the English war poet and soldier, is a movie that blends acute sadness with exquisite pleasure. The pleasure and the sadness are inextricably linked, thus seeming appropriate, given how close aesthetic enjoyment and moral anguish were entwined in Sassoon’s own work. In furious, sorrowful, and, yes, frequently exciting terms, he exposed the horrors of World War I and condemned its architects and enthusiasts for their moral blindness. This biting denunciation appears at the conclusion of his poem “Suicide in the Trenches,” which was first published in 1918:

Sassoon was a decorated veteran of the Western Front who became a conscientious objector before becoming an outspoken advocate for wounded soldiers. He knew what he was talking about, to say the least. “Benediction,” which sprinkles passages of his poetry over gloomy reels of old war footage, is not only a somber commemoration to the wounded and fallen, but also a kindhearted tribute to those survivors who lived with the trauma they had endured. No other filmmaker has his ability to evoke states of loneliness, and he depicts the terrible isolation experienced by those who had endured armed conflict’s terrors.

But “Benediction,” which explores themes beyond the time period that inspired Sassoon’s own poetic imagination, is about more than just one type of solitude. Given the subject matter, it could scarcely be any different. The Israeli-born Sassoon has also discovered an ideal interpreter in the Scottish actor Jack Lowden, who played Tom Hardy’s younger brother in “Dunkirk” and “Fighting With My Family.” We come to understand not only Sassoon’s difficulties with his sexuality, his art and his fate, but also the unpredictable development of those struggles over time as Lowden conveys them in a thoughtfully sensitive, quietly compelling, and finally anguished manner. “Benediction” drifts between past and future, history and memory, capturing the strange, personal alchemy by which opposing bits of self-identity combine to form a soul.

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