The Choral (2026)

My spouse and I watched this on a transatlantic flight because he is very fond of Ralph Fiennes and we both enjoyed this quiet yet thoughtful movie. It focuses on a choral society that attempts to perform The Dream of Gerontius (which I did not love) for their community against the backdrop of World War I, hits its notes with aplomb. However, it might have benefited from a creative vibrato that would have added more layers to its boilerplate narrative. Still, it’s a tune about the impotence of art making in the midst of crisis that bears repeating, as the world that’s all too eager to sacrifice the arts on the altar of productivity and progress. Sound familiar? Well, while there are echoes of that in our life today, the movie is grounded in thr setting of a different era. Set in the fictional town of Ramsden, Yorkshire, in 1916, the era is brought to life with meticulous detail: schoolboys ride their bikes recklessly throughout the town, aristocrats cover their balding scalps with top hats, while steam from the nearby industrial mills wafts through the cobblestone streets. There’s a veneer of normalcy, although the regularity pokes at a more somber truth: the town is in mourning at the toll of the war, which has taken many of their men and left behind grieving families. The young men of the town wait with bated breath to see whether they’ll receive the call to conscription, leaving the rest of the citizens caught in a sort of limbo. It’s hard to go about one’s daily life when the people you’re in community with can be taken at any moment--it is also easy to see the differences in class at this time, something that WWI took a big bite out of in England.