THE CHORAL  
United Kingdom, USA, 2025, 113min
Director: Nicholas Hytner
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Roger Allam, Mark Addy, Alun Armstrong, Simon Russell Beale.

 

"Every day one should listen to good music, read poetry, and admire a beautiful painting, so that worldly cares may not destroy the sense of beauty that God has placed in the human soul."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
While all is quiet on the Western Front, life in a small Yorkshire town follows its familiar rhythms: pheasant shoots, conversations over a pint of ale, Sunday services, and schoolboys recklessly racing their bicycles along cobbled streets.
And then there is the parish choir, facing a new problem of its own, having lost so many of its voices on the battlefields of the Great War.
There are no heroic charges or spectacular battle scenes here. Instead, there are empty chairs at choir rehearsals, anxious letters from the front, and people trying to preserve their dignity, their sense of humour, and their love of music in a world that is rapidly losing its familiar order.
The arrival of a new choirmaster brings into this proper provincial community everything that provokes suspicion, irritation, and even disapproval.
Dr. Henry Guthrie has not only recently returned from Germany, but openly admires German culture, quotes Goethe, and makes no attempt to conceal his personal inclinations. One can hardly blame him: how does one renounce German music—and what then becomes of Bach, Beethoven, or Handel?
Yet it is precisely the man long regarded here as an outsider—with his independence of mind, his disdain for patriotic slogans, and his conviction that every individual has the right to remain true to themselves—who proves capable of breathing new life into the choir and offering its members something far greater.
To do so, however, he will first have to gently shake the local establishment and spark a small musical revolution.
For the townspeople, choir rehearsals become less a pastime than a way of holding on to one another and enduring what can neither be explained nor undone.
And even if the British weather remains the only truly safe subject of conversation, one truth gradually becomes impossible to ignore: the world is far larger and far more complicated than it appears through the window of the local pub.
A tender and deeply moving drama that returns us to the atmosphere of Old England, where history is heard not through gunfire, but through human voices.
At times one longs to shout at the characters, to shake them, to make them see what history has since taught us. But there is no point. We watch their lives from the future, knowing what they could not. And that is where the tragedy lies: the world they know is already slipping away, and it will never be the same again.

 

Language: English