High Notes and Hushed Scandals: Ralph Fiennes Shakes Up War-Time Yorkshire

Olivia Bennett, 12/23/2025 “The Choral” is a sumptuously polished, heartbreakingly reserved war-time drama—more tea and polished silver than raw nerves and thunderous applause. Ralph Fiennes leads a luminous cast in a tapestry that hums with wit and ache, yet too often tucks passion away behind the parlour curtains.

This isn’t the sort of film to tussle its own hair. Ramsden, the invented setting, offers a stand-in for every durable English village, the sort that’s watched their men scooped up by history’s machinery. Grief wafts off the screen—not in showy gusts, but as a gentle fog. Alan Bennett, approaching a century in age and ever the master of subtext, scrawls out a screenplay caught between yearning and decorum. What’s promised? Nationalism, queerness, and music as lifeline—all simmering under the surface.

Director Nicholas Hytner, who’s never been one for theatrical pyrotechnics, keeps his touch feather-light. No risk of teacups trembling here. Yes, Hytner and camera virtuoso Mike Eley steer well clear of wartime’s muddy clichés. The production—filmed in the honeyed brickwork of Saltaire—looks as though someone swaddled it in a fleece and told the rain to stay politely outside. It’s a world trying to hold calamity at arm’s length, relying on music to plug the cracks. Sometimes it works, sometimes the notes float away before the heart can catch them.

Oddly enough, it’s the film’s polish that may hobble its emotional lift-off. One critic compared the picture to an impeccably set table that forgot to serve the wine. “Despite gesturing towards big questions surrounding life, death and music, it’s a stiff, oddly lifeless film where even its beautiful singing manages to fall flat,” The Wrap observed. The crescendos—rare and fleeting—feel muffled, as though the story’s passion is hemmed in by the starched boundaries of English discretion.

It doesn’t help that genuine mess, that raw surge of feeling one expects from all things war-adjacent, is kept tidily in check. The telegram boy, Lofty (Oliver Briscombe), and his sometimes-wily friend Ellis (Taylor Uttley), brush against adulthood and sorrow—but are promptly rerouted into safer, more familiar coming-of-age territory. Where the film could open the floodgates—ambiguities about Guthrie, suppressed desires, the blunt agony of loss—it instead slips the key back under the mat. Everything faintly scandalous is quietly scented and stored away, almost apologetically.

Yet, here and there, the starchy calm is challenged. Simon Russell Beale’s cameo as Elgar is one such bolt from the blue—his entrance, robed in academia and thundering with comic self-assurance, wrests the eye and ear for a moment. One can almost hear the wardrobe department purring with satisfaction. And then, just as swiftly, the fire is banked. The embarrassment of riches in the supporting cast—Mark Addy’s no-nonsense Fyton, Amara Okereke’s luminous Mary, Jacob Dudman’s hollow-eyed Clyde—serves mostly as a gentle reminder of Britain’s ongoing love affair with ensemble drama.

Then there's Fiennes. No scenery chewing here; instead, he plays Guthrie as a man whose wounds are stitched hidden beneath bespoke tweed. His performance is all restraint, his yearning bottled up and corked—so subtle, in fact, that it borders on vanishing point. Subtlety, once an asset, becomes a frustration: viewers may find themselves aching for a break in the clouds, a moment of unmasked, operatic feeling. The music may soar, but the script doesn’t always let the characters follow.

The film’s final moments just about deliver a glimpse of something raw—the camera lingers, the choir’s harmonies melt into silence, and for a heartbeat, the town’s collective grief is allowed to shimmer through the haze. Whether it’s too little, too late, is an open question. “The Choral” winds down not with a bang, but with a distant echo, like the last hymn fading beneath church arches as everyone files back to daily life—marked, but barely daring to admit it.

In the end, what’s left? A drama elegant in its restraint, handsomely costumed, at times maddeningly decorous—a film that gestures at chaos yet refuses to let it take the stage. As one sharp-tongued critic noted, “the fear lives too deeply in the margins,” an observation that lands with a peculiar double resonance. Is that discomfort the point, or the flaw? Possibly both.

Perhaps “The Choral” is less a movie than an embroidered sampler—each thread deftly placed, the whole work admirable, if a touch airless. It’s a portrait of a nation (and a genre) all too wary of raising its voice, even as history drums outside the stained-glass windows. With streaming platforms vying for war-time nostalgia as 2025 approaches, there’s little doubt this quietly reverent offering will find its flock. Still, some viewers, after the credits roll, may be left craving a taste of genuine thunder—a reminder that, sometimes, even the grandest choirs must risk a wrong note.

Cinema, often touted as society’s grand mirror, has a quirky way of showing us things we’d rather not scrutinize too closely—grief in Sunday best, absurdity shouldering up to solemnity. And then comes “The Choral,” determined to polish that glass not with Hollywood’s sequined polish, but something subtler and more time-worn. No glitter bombs here. The film, Yorkshire-rooted and thick with World War I’s remote sorrows, carries Ralph Fiennes forward in a role as measured and meticulous as a cathedral choir rehearsal: Dr. Guthrie, a choirmaster-in-exile, tasked with stitching together a community left bare by war.This isn’t the sort of film to tussle its own hair. Ramsden, the invented setting, offers a stand-in for every durable English village, the sort that’s watched their men scooped up by history’s machinery. Grief wafts off the screen—not in showy gusts, but as a gentle fog. Alan Bennett, approaching a century in age and ever the master of subtext, scrawls out a screenplay caught between yearning and decorum. What’s promised? Nationalism, queerness, and music as lifeline—all simmering under the surface.Director Nicholas Hytner, who’s never been one for theatrical pyrotechnics, keeps his touch feather-light. No risk of teacups trembling here. Yes, Hytner and camera virtuoso Mike Eley steer well clear of wartime’s muddy clichés. The production—filmed in the honeyed brickwork of Saltaire—looks as though someone swaddled it in a fleece and told the rain to stay politely outside. It’s a world trying to hold calamity at arm’s length, relying on music to plug the cracks. Sometimes it works, sometimes the notes float away before the heart can catch them.Oddly enough, it’s the film’s polish that may hobble its emotional lift-off. One critic compared the picture to an impeccably set table that forgot to serve the wine. “Despite gesturing towards big questions surrounding life, death and music, it’s a stiff, oddly lifeless film where even its beautiful singing manages to fall flat,” The Wrap observed. The crescendos—rare and fleeting—feel muffled, as though the story’s passion is hemmed in by the starched boundaries of English discretion.It doesn’t help that genuine mess, that raw surge of feeling one expects from all things war-adjacent, is kept tidily in check. The telegram boy, Lofty (Oliver Briscombe), and his sometimes-wily friend Ellis (Taylor Uttley), brush against adulthood and sorrow—but are promptly rerouted into safer, more familiar coming-of-age territory. Where the film could open the floodgates—ambiguities about Guthrie, suppressed desires, the blunt agony of loss—it instead slips the key back under the mat. Everything faintly scandalous is quietly scented and stored away, almost apologetically.Yet, here and there, the starchy calm is challenged. Simon Russell Beale’s cameo as Elgar is one such bolt from the blue—his entrance, robed in academia and thundering with comic self-assurance, wrests the eye and ear for a moment. One can almost hear the wardrobe department purring with satisfaction. And then, just as swiftly, the fire is banked. The embarrassment of riches in the supporting cast—Mark Addy’s no-nonsense Fyton, Amara Okereke’s luminous Mary, Jacob Dudman’s hollow-eyed Clyde—serves mostly as a gentle reminder of Britain’s ongoing love affair with ensemble drama.Then there's Fiennes. No scenery chewing here; instead, he plays Guthrie as a man whose wounds are stitched hidden beneath bespoke tweed. His performance is all restraint, his yearning bottled up and corked—so subtle, in fact, that it borders on vanishing point. Subtlety, once an asset, becomes a frustration: viewers may find themselves aching for a break in the clouds, a moment of unmasked, operatic feeling. The music may soar, but the script doesn’t always let the characters follow.The film’s final moments just about deliver a glimpse of something raw—the camera lingers, the choir’s harmonies melt into silence, and for a heartbeat, the town’s collective grief is allowed to shimmer through the haze. Whether it’s too little, too late, is an open question. “The Choral” winds down not with a bang, but with a distant echo, like the last hymn fading beneath church arches as everyone files back to daily life—marked, but barely daring to admit it.In the end, what’s left? A drama elegant in its restraint, handsomely costumed, at times maddeningly decorous—a film that gestures at chaos yet refuses to let it take the stage. As one sharp-tongued critic noted, “the fear lives too deeply in the margins,” an observation that lands with a peculiar double resonance. Is that discomfort the point, or the flaw? Possibly both.Perhaps “The Choral” is less a movie than an embroidered sampler—each thread deftly placed, the whole work admirable, if a touch airless. It’s a portrait of a nation (and a genre) all too wary of raising its voice, even as history drums outside the stained-glass windows. With streaming platforms vying for war-time nostalgia as 2025 approaches, there’s little doubt this quietly reverent offering will find its flock. Still, some viewers, after the credits roll, may be left craving a taste of genuine thunder—a reminder that, sometimes, even the grandest choirs must risk a wrong note.