This isn’t a film that wallows in sentimentality, but it does sit within that familiar British tradition – think ‘Fisherman’s Friends’ or ‘The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill’ – where an outsider arrives in a small community, meets resistance, and eventually changes it forever.

Here, that outsider is Ralph Fiennes as Dr Guthrie, a brilliant but troubled choirmaster who takes over a parish choir in a Yorkshire mill town in 1916. Guthrie has recently returned from years spent in Germany – enough to raise eyebrows in wartime Britain. He’s unmarried, scholarly, perhaps a little secretive, and the locals are unsure whether to trust him.

In a climate where German composers like Bach and Beethoven are seen as unpatriotic, Guthrie insists on staging Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ – a work about the soul’s journey to heaven. It becomes a battle between musical tradition and creative freedom, between fear and faith.

Around this, the film paints a vivid portrait of a community living under the shadow of war. Some of the men are preparing to fight; others have returned broken. There’s a devastating scene involving a wounded soldier asking his former lover for help in the most intimate, desperate way imaginable – one of several moments that underline how war reshapes both body and spirit.

Written by Alan Bennett, the film blends wit, melancholy, and humanity. It’s part underdog story – about an amateur choir finding its voice, not unlike ‘Military Wives’ – and part meditation on survival, courage, and art as resistance. Even the smallest subplots, like a young man’s awkward bid to lose his virginity before heading to the front, speak to the longing for connection in a world unravelling.

Simon Russell Beale provides a pivotal counterpoint to the adage about meeting one’s heroes, and Fiennes is superb – a man whose love of music borders on the sacred. There’s a wonderful scene where a brick is hurled through the church window mid-rehearsal, and Fiennes calmly tells the singers to carry on. That, in essence, is the film’s message: in a world filled with horror, the greatest act of defiance is to keep singing.

The final act feels a little muted, but the film’s heart is true. ‘The Choral asks’ – as ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ once did – whether even in our darkest hours, the soul can still soar.