An eccentric outsider descends on a small town to head their local choir in a colorfully-untraditional direction during wartime. 

You’ve seen variations of The Choral’s crowd-pleasing premise ad infinitum. Customarily, the crowd-pleasing dominates the tone, with merely intermittent references to the war, as a juxtaposition of the beauty they’re trying to create amidst all of their loss. 

But The Choral rebalances this audience-friendly recipe to really steep the movie in the pervasive presence of the war’s aftershocks on this community. Whenever they — and we — escape into amusing crowd-pleasing, the amusements quickly cease as the overbearing tragedy of war inevitably penetrates their — and our — fleeting cocoons of comfort. 

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Can you say: AI period backdrops?