Rating: R | Runtime: 113 minutes
Release Date: November 7th, 2025 (UK) / December 25th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Sony Pictures Releasing / Sony Pictures Classics
Director(s): Nicholas Hytner
Writer(s): Alan Bennett

It’s the young men who are dying.

I kept forgetting what The Choral was throughout its progressions towards an inevitable farewell because it often feels like the sort of story that will eventually find a happy ending. Its amateur choral searching for inspiration and purpose at a moment of horror like World War I reaching the night of their performance only to discover hope will prevail. But that is fairy tale thinking and director Nicholas Hytner and screenwriter Alan Bennett have too much respect for the history to stray far from the harsh reality of fate.

So, whenever things do flirt with leaning into the fact that half the principal cast are teens with sex, fun, and adventure on their minds, it can seem a bit tonally incongruous with the overall theme of inevitability. I do believe it’s with purpose, though. To remind audiences that life isn’t fair and circumstances don’t change as a result of artistic endeavors. Such artistic endeavors simply allow for such tragedies to go down easier … and this truth should always matter more than ego. Because, in many ways, the music is exactly what these boys are dying for.

The teen sex comedy antics can’t help but feel weird nonetheless considering the subject matter. And the era being one where women are expected to oblige men makes many of the exchanges difficult to watch since we’re supposed to read many of them as contextually endearing. But a lot of what occurs is worthwhile. Especially the futility of the young tricking themselves into patriotism and the old reconciling the awful truth behind that “heroic” desire to serve. The film exists in Elgar’s purgatory as his angel and devil stand off-stage. If the characters’ prevalent depressive air is any indication, the wait won’t be long.

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Ralph Fiennes as Dr. Henry Guthrie in THE CHORAL. Image: Nicola Dove. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.