(Above: Al Pacino in Dead Man’s Wire (2025). © Stefania Rosini SMPSP via IMDB).

By M. Faust

Music is so ubiquitous in our lives that it bears remembering what a rarity it was for most of human history. Prior to the last century, if you wanted music you had to make it yourself. If you wanted more than you could achieve at the piano or guitar, you had to get together with your neighbors. And the easiest and least expensive way to do that was to sing. 

The Choral—here a noun, not an adjective—goes back to early 1916, when British communities usually had singing groups open to all who could hold a tune, and even some who couldn’t quite. 

In the Yorkshire mill town of Ramsden, the Choral Society is having trouble mounting its planned performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Many of its male singers have enlisted to fight in the war. The locals aren’t terribly happy about performing the work of a German composer (and in this field, that was most of them). The final straw comes when the chorus master quits to enlist.

With few candidates to fill the position, the Society turns to native son Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes). The fact that he has only recently returned to England from Germany, where he went to work with better singers, is not in his favor. Neither is the suspicion that he is, ahem, “not a family man.” But he is talented and fiercely committed to music. 

Forced to abandon Bach, Guthrie suggest an alternative British oratorio, Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Even this meets with some opposition, based as it was on a poem by Catholic theologian John Henry Newman. And it generally requires a much larger ensemble than Guthrie has at his disposal: as it is, he is pulling men off the streets to join the choir. His work is cut out for him. 

Synopsizing a movie for those of you who haven’t yet seeing it is a tricky business. It requires providing as much of the plot as you need to know without giving away too many of the details. As written by British theater legend Alan Bennett and directed by Nicholas Hytner, (their past collaborations include The Madness of King George, The History Boys and The Lady in the Van, not to mention numerous plays) The Choral is far heavier on details than on plot.

The war is the real issue, even more in our heads than those of the film’s characters. Many of them are still accepting the government’s assurance that the war will be over by Christmas, even as they start military conscription for the first time in England’s history. Every family has lost someone: the luckier ones welcomed back sons with terrible injuries. And we know that a few months will bring the Battle of the Somme, probably the most blood-drenched military encounter in history. It makes the preoccupation of the local 17-year-olds to lose their virginities before heading off to war more poignant than it already is. 

If you count yourself a fan of British cinema, The Choral is probably the kind of movie you have in mind. It’s a handsome period piece, taking advantage of Yorkshire settings that haven’t changed much in the past century. It has splendid cast, including Roger Allam as the owner of the mill and chief financial supporter of the Choral Society, if hardly its best tenor, Simon Russell Beale as Elgar, and Alun Armstrong and Mark Addy as town businessmen. 

The problem with it is that it touches a lot of bases without developing them, failing on the way to score a home run. (Sorry, sports metaphors are not my strong suit.) There is pointed dialogue about British classism—“Choral society shouldn’t mirror the social order, it should transcend it”; “We’re fodder for the mill, and we’ll be fodder for the front”—but nothing real to say about the issue. Guthrie’s decision to rework Elgar’s oratorio against the composer’s wishes leads intriguing staging choices that aren’t as climactic as you would expect. And the film’s interest in youthful sexuality seems utterly out of place. The Choral isn’t a waste of time, but don’t expect anything on the order of The King’s Speech. Now playing at the North Park Theater. 

Anyone remember Gus Van Sant? One of the most notable American filmmakers of the 1990s and 2000s—Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Milk—he seemed to have since drifted off into television work and the occasional experimental feature that seemed to perplex audiences. 

He’s back with Dead Man’s Wire. Like Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, which just ended a one week booking at a suburban multiplex, the film’s opening credits speak to why we haven’t been seeing more work from him: it took no fewer than 15 production companies to fund this, suggesting that the bulk of an independent filmmaker’s job these days is raising money. (Not to mention dealing with 14 producers and an alarming 90 executive producers.) 

The film is based on a true story. In 1977, small-time business developer Tony Kiritsis (played here by Bill Skarsgård) went to the office of his mortgage broker, Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery), subdued him with a pistol and rigged a shotgun to his head with a “dead man’s wire,” a device that would cause the gun to go off if Hall tried to escape or if Kiritsis was shot by the police.

How could he have been sure the police would show up? Because he called them. Kiritsis feels that he has been wronged by the mortgage company and wants not only financial restitution but a public apology. 

From there on, the less said the better. Van Sant (working from a script by Austin Kolodney inspired by a 2018 documentary of the same name) is in no hurry to lay out the details of the story too quickly, and if we are prone to make assumptions, that’s fine with him. By the time you leave the theater, you’re likely to find that a few of your assumptions were incorrect. 

Van Sant teases our memories of the all-time classic hostage movie, Dog Day Afternoon, from the moment Kiritsis enters Hall’s office building with a gun wrapped in the same kind of long box Al Pacino used in the Sidney Lumet movie. Pacino himself even shows up, in a scene stealing extended cameo as Hall’s icily unsympathetic father, the target Kiritsis was really after. 

Other characters drawn into the situation that drags out for several days include Myha’la as an ambitious junior reporter who makes sure she retains command of this story, Cary Elwes as the police detective in charge, and Colman Domingo as an FM deejay on whom Kiritsis is fixated. (He also gets to play a terrific selection of mostly obscure 1970s tunes.) 

Given that we’re meant not to know exactly how to react to Kiritsis, Skarsgård was the perfect choice to play him, going from psychotic to pathetic and back in a breath. (He replaced Nicolas Cage, who was cast with Werner Herzog directing.) But the real surprise is Montgomery, unrecognizable from his role in “Stranger Things”: mostly immobile and silent, he builds sympathy where we weren’t expecting to have any. It’s at the Regal Walden Galleria, Transit and Quaker theaters, probably only for a week.