The Choral (2025)
Something feels appropriate, almost inevitable, about a film centred on Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius that never quite lifts off into transcendence itself. Nicholas Hytner’s The Choral, written by Alan Bennett, belongs to that familiar category of British period drama that ticks all the right boxes without ever really surprising you. Handsome production, solid performances, themes that matter. And yet the whole affair remains stubbornly earthbound.
We’re in the fictional Yorkshire town of Ramsden, 1916. The Great War has drained the local choral society of its male voices, so the committee does what desperate people do: they hire someone controversial. Enter Dr Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), fresh back from Germany and carrying enough red flags to make the locals nervous. He’s suspected of Germanophilia, he’s an atheist, and he’s almost certainly homosexual. Guthrie responds to the suspicion by recruiting an ensemble that would have scandalised the town under any circumstances: teenage boys facing the draft, shell-shocked veterans, women, even the local sex worker. Their goal? Performing Elgar’s deeply Catholic oratorio. Because if you’re going to court controversy, you might as well be thorough about it.
Fiennes does what he does best, which is to play intelligence and restraint in equal measure. His Guthrie understands something fundamental: a conductor is only as good as the voices around him. There’s none of the usual theatrics you’d expect from the stern-but-secretly-tender maestro character. Just competence, conviction, and a man who knows his gifts mean nothing without collaboration. The supporting cast does fine work too. Roger Allam, Mark Addy, and Simon Russell Beale (appearing briefly as Elgar) deliver Bennett’s dialogue with the precision it deserves.
The film looks marvellous, I should say. Peter Francis has recreated wartime Yorkshire with real care: the industrial grime of the mills, the class divisions written into every costume and building, the omnipresent dread of telegrams bearing bad news. Mike Eley’s cinematography finds ways to keep things visually interesting even when people are just standing around singing, which is no small achievement.
But here’s where things get complicated. Bennett’s script wants to tackle class, religion, sexuality, prostitution, and war trauma. That’s ambitious. Perhaps too ambitious for 113 minutes. Each theme gets introduced, acknowledged, then shuffled aside before it can develop any real weight. The film sets up Guthrie’s homosexuality as a source of tension and then… doesn’t quite know what to do with it. We’re supposed to care about the young men waiting to be conscripted, but they get less interesting material than the women, whose stories feel frustratingly underdeveloped. Some of the sexual dynamics involving the young men play as period humour, which rather undercuts our ability to feel much grief when they’re sent off to die.
There’s a scene late in the film where Guthrie defends his decision to revise Elgar’s work, arguing that art inevitably reflects the moment of its performance. It’s the film’s strongest moment, in my view, because it articulates something the rest of the movie seems to understand only intermittently: that making music in wartime isn’t frivolous escapism but a necessary human response to horror. The actual singing, performed by trained vocalists rather than actors miming, is genuinely beautiful.
What we end up with is something pleasant and professional but oddly cautious. The Choral recognises that its subject matter could be radical but never quite commits to being as iconoclastic as its protagonist. The film might have worked better if it had chosen fewer narrative threads to follow, or alternatively, if it had given itself more time to properly explore what it introduces. As it stands, we get a medley rather than a symphony: brief encounters with multiple ideas that never quite cohere into something sustained or memorable.
If you’re after an accessible period drama with good performances and lovely music, The Choral will do the job. If you’re hoping for something with sharper edges or deeper emotional resonance, you might find yourself admiring the technical accomplishment without feeling particularly affected. It’s a film that knows what matters but can’t quite find the courage to dig where it hurts.