‘The Choral’ Review: Ralph Fiennes is Pitch-Perfect in Old-Fashioned British Wartime Drama [B] TIFF
Yorkshire, England, 1916. Young Lofty (Oliver Briscombe) has the unenviable task of delivering the bad news to the townsfolk that their loved ones have died in battle. The Great War is raging, and men are being conscripted or joining up – and dying – in large numbers. The local choral society, under the leadership of mill owner Alderman Duxbury (Roger Allam), has lost its chorus master to the war only a few weeks before a performance. In the absence of anyone else qualified, the choral leadership reluctantly offers the position to Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), a brilliant musician who has committed the nearly unforgivable sin of having lived and worked for a number of recent years in Germany. Lacking the male voices to perform the society’s original selection, Guthrie replaces it with the British composer Edward Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius,” about an old man dying and the battle between an angel and devil for his soul. Guthrie swells the chorus’s numbers by asking Lofty and Ellis – lured in by the pretty girls going to auditions, as any seventeen-year-old boy would be – what other boys in town can sing. Before long, they have enough voices, but as more conscriptions come through, will they be able to continue? Or will Guthrie’s high standards stop them before they even get there?
The storytelling beats of Nicholas Hytner’s The Choral may be overly familiar, but the restraint in the performances and direction make it comfort food cinema at its finest. The uplift of the story, written by Oscar nominee Alan Bennett, never pushes the audience too hard towards where it wants them to go, much to its benefit. Right off the bat, as Lofty delivers bad news to the women of the village, Hytner keeps George Fenton’s score at bay, letting the emotional moments play out in a stark silence that grounds the film in the real horrors of war as experienced on the homefront. This melancholy feeling remains in the background of the film from beginning to end, always ready to flare up at the most unexpected moments. Bennett’s dialogue delivers profound one-liners with regularity, covering a wide range of topics from the dead-end lives that lead young men to join the army to the limits of nationalistic pride to the actual horrors of the front. Nearly every scene contains at least one dialogue exchange between characters talking about how the war affects them, acknowledging how war infects every part of daily life, whether or not you’re serving in the army. Perhaps this is how you make a truly anti-war film – not by showing the terrible sights and sounds of battle, but by showing the damage it does to lives even hundreds of miles away from the trenches.
Bennett’s screenplay does a lovely job of creating satisfying story arcs for an impressive number of the choral society members. In addition to Lofty and Ellis, there’s Mary (Amara Okereke), a black Salvation Army worker with an angelic voice, and Mitch (Shaun Thomas), another teenager who’s smitten with her. There’s Guthrie’s pianist Robert (Robert Emms), who has mixed feelings about his conscription, the friendly neighborhood sex worker Mrs. Bishop (Lyndsey Marshal), and the lovely, lonely Bella (Emily Fairn) whose boyfriend Clyde (Jacob Dudman) has been missing in action at the front. All these characters and more feel remarkably fleshed out for how many of them there are, and watching the relationships between them grow and deepen is always compelling.
Making the film a portrait of a community allows for the presence of numerous thematic threads, which Bennett manages by always tying them back to religious morality. Not the most original or compelling theme for a film that takes place during WWI, but as a unifying principle for the film, it works. The music performed by the choral society is all religious in nature, so it’s only natural for the subject to be on their minds, but having the spectre of death hanging over them at all times plays a part, too. Clyde was the chorus’s lead tenor before heading to war, and after his time in battle, he has a bit of an identity crisis. Despite outward appearances, Bella had resigned herself to his death and tried to move on emotionally, leaving him with nothing upon his return. When the vicar objects to the idea of purgatory in “The Dream of Gerontius,” Clyde says that no matter what the Church of England says, he has seen purgatory: No Man’s Land. This prompts Guthrie to give him the title role in the performance instead of Duxbury, to connect more with everyone’s lives; it’s not the old men who are dying these days, it’s the young men. “Life has given you a consolation prize,” Guthrie says when he hears him sing, and not even Duxbury can deny the power of Clyde’s angelic voice reaching for the heavens as Gerontius.
The climactic performance of “Gerontius” is the film’s best moment, earning every ounce of emotion built up to that point. In a break tradition, Guthrie decides to add costumes and light staging to the performance, and while the quality may stretch disbelief a bit, the staging includes some undeniably powerful imagery. The film doesn’t spend too much time on the chorus’s rehearsals, so the performance feels relatively low-stakes, but the strong focus on character throughout makes the feeling of triumph inherent in the material even stronger. We may not watch the characters struggle with the performance all that much, but their day-to-day struggles provide more than enough for them to overcome, and their performance feels like a victory for how joyous it is to hear their myriad voices rising together as one.
The ensemble works together beautifully, creating relationships with each other that feel lived-in and deeply layered from years of living in the same town. With his first feature film in 10 years, Hytner exerts strong control over tone, making sure all the performances blend together in beautiful harmony. Fiennes is the main soloist, though, and he leads the cast with his inimitable subtle style. His natural imperiousness makes him a perfect fit for the high-minded Guthrie, but Fiennes uses some subtle shifts in facial expressions to soften and humanize him. The hint of a playful smile when challenging the choral leadership, the twinge of fear when Robert brings up the possibility of a tryst – Fiennes could do this sort of thing in his sleep, but those small moments add so much to the character that isn’t on the page, elevating the material through good, old-fashioned character work. There’s not a single member of the large cast who doesn’t endeavor to elevate the material in some way, taking what is a basic if well-written script and making it feel special with beautifully judged line readings.
This is all quite typical of British prestige dramas, and no one in their right mind would call The Choral groundbreaking, or even particularly exciting. The fact that it continues on for what amounts to an epilogue after the climactic performance ruins the high of that moment, but like the rest of the film, it feels appropriately unsentimental for a film that takes place in the time and place that it does without feeling cold. Indeed, this very quality makes The Choral one of the most genuinely heartwarming films of the year. It may not be particularly deep, but it makes you feel good while respecting your intelligence.
Grade: B
This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where The Choral had its world premiere. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film theatrically in the U.S. this winter.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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