A small Yorkshire town seeks solace from the ravages of the First World War by funneling its pain and anxieties into music in Nicholas Hytner’s poignant drama, The Choral.
Starring Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes (The Constant Gardener, Conclave), this heart-stirring period drama from director Nicholas Hytner (The Madness of King George, The Lady in the Van) tells the story of a town grappling with loss, suspicion, and the faint glimmers of hope carried through song during the First World War. Written by Hytner’s longtime collaborator Alan Bennett, the film is less about war’s battlefields and more about its quieter devastations, grief, prejudice, and the small victories of human connection.
The year is 1916, and the Great War has bled the town of its men, leaving the once-thriving choral society nearly voiceless. When Dr. Guthrie (Fiennes), a demanding and unconventional choir director, arrives, he scraps their familiar program and insists on staging Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. His decision is particularly controversial, given Elgar’s Catholic roots; it unsettles the society’s benefactors, especially the rigidly patriotic mill owner (Alun Armstrong). Guthrie, English but trained in Germany, is immediately perceived as an outsider, distrusted not only for his methods but for the faint whiff of “enemy” culture he represents.
To realize his vision, Guthrie begins recruiting the town’s adolescent boys to fill the missing voices, dragging them from factories, fields, and schoolrooms into the echoing halls of the choir loft. Their youth and inexperience clash with his exacting standards, but slowly, under his relentless discipline, they discover not just harmony, but a kind of resilience that prepares them for the darker trials looming over their inevitable conscription into the war itself.
The film uses this clash of wills and voices to explore how art can serve as both a unifying force and a dividing line. Many townspeople cling to the safety of tradition, fearful of Guthrie’s foreign-trained techniques and elitist bearing. Class prejudice simmers in every rehearsal, as the sons of mill workers and the privileged few are forced to stand side by side, their voices blending even as their families remain divided by station. In this way, The Choral becomes a parable about suspicion of outsiders, the corrosive effects of rigid hierarchy, and the stubborn resilience of community when music bridges divides.
Fiennes, in one of his most restrained and affecting performances, embodies Guthrie with a stiff upper lip, all clipped precision and authority, yet allows glimpses of vulnerability, anxieties, secrets, and even shame to ripple beneath the surface. His Guthrie is as much in search of salvation as his pupils, though he never admits it outright. He is joined by British stage stalwarts Simon Russell Beale and Roger Allam, whose gravitas adds texture to the ensemble.
Hytner’s direction is unfussy but elegant, allowing Bennett’s writing to draw out the irony and tragedy of wasted youth being prepared for a stage they may never live to see. There’s a bleakness to the film, yes, but also a transcendent beauty in the choral scenes themselves, where the music briefly drowns out the war drums. These moments, shot with a reverence that makes them feel almost liturgical, remind us that in times of chaos, art becomes both a sanctuary and a form of resistance.
If there is a flaw, it lies in the pacing: Hytner occasionally lingers too long on the town’s internecine squabbles, making the middle section drag. Yet even in these slower moments, the tension between patriotism, prejudice, and personal ambition reveals how easily fear can fracture communities.
The Choral doesn’t reinvent the period drama, but it resonates because of what it reflects to us. Beneath the hymns and the candlelit halls, the story exposes how suspicion of outsiders, rigid class prejudice, and fear of change can divide people just as surely as war itself. And in the end, it is the music, soaring, defiant, and achingly beautiful, that provides the film’s catharsis.
Grade: B
