The girls of the heart in the wolf's throat

The innocuous Spanish title of this tense Czech drama does not foretell its unsettling content. The original, Sbormistr, a single word meaning “the master of the choir,” offers more clues: the film is an empathetic portrayal of an entirely female community, that of the youth choir in the title, and a single man, this revered and feared master who is also a compulsive sexual predator.

Freely based on a real case that shocked Czech society, Ondrej Provazník, director and screenwriter of the film, tackles a topic as global as sexual violence against girls and adolescents – and the social and economic circumstances that facilitate it – from a completely individual perspective: that of one of the victims, Karolina (the debutant Katerina Falbrová, a luminous revelation), who, at just thirteen years old, joins the prestigious vocal group to which her older sister also belongs. It is surely this perspective that explains Provazník's atmospheric staging, which recreates a hermetic adolescent female universe set in the nineties with resonances of Sofia Coppola's cinema. Under this irresistible appearance (blue-eyed shadows, braids, walkmans, and Madonna t-shirts), the film does not flinch from explicitly stating, almost didactically, how abuse of power and sexual abuse against minors works, showing it as an endless cycle of violence that needs complicit silence to continue to subsist.