The girls of the heart in the wolf's throat

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

Loosely based on a real case that shocked Czech society, Ondrej Provazník, the film's director and screenwriter, 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 an hermetic teenage female universe set in the nineties with resonances of Sofia Coppola's cinema. Beneath this irresistible appearance (blue-eyed shadows, braids, walkmans, and Madonna t-shirts), the film does not flinch from explicitly explaining, almost didactically, how abuse of power and sexual abuse against minors works, showing it as an endless cycle of violence that requires complicit silence to continue to exist.