While he’s hardly a household name, writer/director Nicholas Hytner is among the most influential English filmmakers in regards to American crossover successes. The United States’ arthouse cinema circles have had a fascination with their British counterparts for decades, and seem to perceive the most by-the-numbers films from that country as high art; why else would the Academy Awards give their Best Picture prizes to tweeners like The King’s Speech or Shakespeare in Love? Those victories came at the cost of The Social Network and Saving Private Ryan.
Hytner’s first film, 1994’s The Madness of King George, is entertaining as a silly farce, but it's far more successful as a broad comedy about the English aristocracy. It’s still his best work, because Hytner’s feckless subsequent efforts seemed impenetrable to criticism for the better part of three decades; his muted adaptation of The Crucible managed to attract Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, and the adaptation of his stage play The History Boy earned accolades without any concerns raised about its sinister undertones. Hytner may have managed to continue his charade had he reigned in his indulgences, but his latest film The Choral is essentially an “emperor with no clothes” moment.
The Choral is the type of film that would be considered “Oscar bait” had it been released in the 1990s, but in 2025, it’s the third priority for Sony Pictures Classics, a studio that’s likely to have more success with Scarlett Johansson's directorial debut Eleanor the Great and the World War II epic Nuremberg. The appeal that a film like The Choral would have historically is that it could mask itself under the veil of self-importance without the insertion of any content that would put off more conservative viewers. What’s made The Choral so inexplicable is that Hytner doesn’t have his finger on what the film’s message should be, and it’s so lazy in its execution that it may aggravate his core audience.
The Choral may take every pretense to pretend that it is vaguely based on a true story, but the film can’t even collect vague title cards that point to its authenticity; this is purely fictional, and closer to propaganda when its implications are considered. Ralph Fiennes is perfectly cast as Dr. Henry Guthrie, a respected organist who spent several years in Germany as a conductor before his return to the fictional town of Ramsden, Yorkshire. The presumption is that Guthrie could bring the community together through a performance of an Edward Elgar musical number, which would incentivize the town’s young men and women to focus on anything other than the war. However, Hytner’s so focused on Guthrie as a parallel to any censored artist that the narrative’s overwhelmed; the young cast are mostly interchangeable.
The implied persecution that Guthrie is faced with is laughable. The Choral’s suggestion is that commoners are dogmatic in their hesitation to hire a musician who dared to suggest that not all Germans were fascists, but the film isn’t bold enough to show any venomous backlash Guthrie received, outside of a few scoffs and under-the-breath sarcastic comments. The ongoing draft is weaponized as a tool to insert melodrama, with any young chorists with a hint of personality whisked away to presumably die in the trenches. While there’s a compelling conversation to be had about the relationship between patriotism and nationalism, The Choral doesn’t give Guthrie the opportunity to speak about what he learned during his experiences as a conductor in Germany.
The brief moments of insight within The Choral come from the fleeting interactions between World War I veterans who’ve returned to Ramsden and the community’s young men, who remain idealistic about the heroism of service. However, Hytner’s too quick to find solutions, with the implication that an excellent performance of “The Dream of Gerontius” would be enough to invoke civic pride. Beyond his assertion that the British commonwealth is a singular entity that can be easily swayed in different directions, Hytner can’t help but insert an over-the-top villain for the sake of dramatic convenience. It wouldn’t be a film about the freedom of expression if the third act didn’t include an appearance by faceless board members who try to shut down Guthrie’s performance on the grounds that it is not “traditional” enough.
The staginess of The Choral may have been forgivable if the film took pride in its setting, but Hytner’s depiction of the close-knit mill town is juvenile. The most exciting part about military service for the conscripted young men is the excuse it’s given them to spend their evenings with the busy sex worker Mrs. Bishop (Lyndsey Marshal). There’s a vague hint that some of the named characters (including Guthrie himself) may be attracted to the same sex, but any overt allusions to homosexuality are scrubbed out. Guthrie has come to represent the close-minded, populist notion of non-interrogative art that The Choral was seemingly intended to rally against.
The presence of British stage actors like Mark Addy and Simon Russell Beale would typically elevate the material, but The Choral’s too reliant on them to draw false profundity out of its sheepish monologues. The one great element of the film is Fiennes, whose performance as a dry-witted sophisticate is so effective that there’s nearly a metatextual reading that he’s exasperated by the mundanity of Hytner’s material.