Directed by Nicholas Hytner
Certificate 12a
113 minutes
Released 7 November

Two years into the First World War, Ramsden, Yorkshire, is feeling the pinch. The musical director of the local choral society has just joined up, forcing the organiser, local mill owner and sometime tenor Alderman Duxbury (Roger Allam) to hire a replacement. The British conductor Dr. Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) has been working in Germany.

Performance pieces like Handel’s Messiah are German, and therefore unsuitable, as is anything by Handel’s fellow countrymen Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. A replacement is found The Dream of Gerontius by the English composer Sir Edward Elgar.

The drive is on to recruit local folk for the choir, with seventeen-year-old Ellis (Taylor Uttley) joining primarily to find himself a girl. He accompanies his pal, the telegram boy pal Lofty (Oliver Briscombe), on his rounds as he delivers news of deaths from the Front and, following the 1916 Conscription Act, conscription notes to households from the King.

Ellis has his eye on Bella (Emily Fairn), whose boyfriend Clyde joined up and is now missing, presumed dead. She succumbs to Ellis’ charms and their relationship is goes like a house on fire. Additional choir recruits include the Salvation Army volunteer Mary (Amara Okereke) who, unlike other girls, refuses any boy pursuing her.

The brilliant and original script by Alan Bennett is filled both with wry comic moments (many of them about sex) and astute observations on the effects of war on countries in armed conflict outside their own borders. The social pressure on men to join the armed forces is constant and intense, with little realisation of the horrors that await them.

Some of those horrors are communicated when soldiers return. One, a gifted singer, is given the lead role in Gerontius, transforming Elgar’s dying old man into a young soldier. Elgar himself (Simon Russell Beale) makes a surprise visit and is appalled, insisting the concert be cancelled. However, performing means too much for Duxbury and his choir, so they must find a way around this.

Jeremy Clarke is a film critic