Name: Broken Voices
Director: Ondřej Provazník
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Released: 2025-07-10T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 104 min
Cast: Kateřina Falbrová, Juraj Loj, Maya Kintera, Zuzana Šulajová, Marek Cisovský

A gifted 13-year-old wins a place in a world-famous girls’ choir, and the reward slowly starts to look like a snare. That is the cold engine of Broken Voices, the Czech psychological thriller that writer-director Ondřej Provazník has built around the seductive, corrosive authority of a beloved choirmaster. It is a film about ambition — a child’s, a family’s, an institution’s — and about how easily that ambition can be turned into a leash.

Newcomer Kateřina Falbrová plays Karolína, a novice singer talented enough to catch the eye of the ensemble’s revered conductor, Vít Mácha, played with unnerving calm by Juraj Loj. Karolína sings alongside her older sister and a clutch of rivals, all of them competing for solos, for approval, for the maestro’s gaze. Provazník shoots the rehearsal room as a place of beauty and menace at once, where the pursuit of a flawless sound quietly licenses everything the adults in the room choose not to see.

Set in the early 1990s, as Czechoslovakia edges out of communism into a hungrier, more image-conscious era, the film draws openly on the Bambini di Praga case — the real scandal in which a celebrated Prague children’s-choir director was convicted of abusing girls in his care over many years. Provazník and co-writer Kateřina Ondřejková have been careful to describe the result as a loose interpretation rather than a reconstruction; the names and specifics are invented, and the story is far less interested in courtroom fact than in the mechanics of grooming, complicity and denial.

What makes Broken Voices land is how ordinary it lets the horror feel. Loj never plays Mácha as a monster; he plays him as a man everyone in the room wants to please, which is far worse. Falbrová, in her first major screen role, holds the center with a wary stillness that critics singled out at the premiere. Reviewers reached for Whiplash as shorthand for the film’s portrait of artistic tyranny, but Provazník is after something quieter and more damning: the way institutions defend their own prestige, and the way a child learns to keep a secret in order to keep her place.

The music is part of the trap. The choir’s soaring, disciplined sound is genuinely beautiful, and the film refuses to let the audience separate that beauty from the coercion that produces it. Every note the girls are pushed to reach is also a measure of how much control the man at the podium has been handed, by parents dazzled by prestige and by an institution that treats a great result as its own justification. The camera lingers on faces rather than spelling things out, so that the dread accumulates in glances, hesitations and the small compromises the girls make to stay in favour.

Provazník is just as interested in the home as in the rehearsal hall. Karolína’s place in the choir is a source of pride for a family that reads the maestro’s interest as validation rather than warning, and the older sister already inside the ensemble becomes both ally and rival, protector and cautionary example. The film is unsparing about how ordinary aspiration — the wish to see a talented daughter rewarded — can grease the machinery of abuse, and how a household can talk itself into looking away. It is a period piece only on the surface; the dynamics it maps, of prestige buying silence and children absorbing the cost, are pointedly current.

None of that has translated into the tidy awards run its backers wanted. Officials at the Czech Film and Television Academy openly recommended Broken Voices as the country’s Oscar submission, a push that several filmmakers publicly called manipulative; when the full membership voted, they chose Klára Tasovská’s documentary I’m Not Everything I Want to Be instead. The film also stops short of catharsis. It diagnoses how abuse is enabled far more confidently than it imagines any reckoning, and viewers looking for justice — or even for the adults around Karolína to simply act — will leave with the discomfort intact. That refusal is deliberate, but it means the film indicts a system without pretending to have cured it.

Kateřina Falbrová in the Czech drama Broken Voices (2025) — Kateřina Falbrová in *Broken Voices* (2025)

The festival record, at least, is not in doubt. Broken Voices premiered in the main competition at Karlovy Vary, where Falbrová took a Special Jury Mention and the film won the Europa Cinemas Label. It added the Czech Film Critics’ Award for best film, an audience prize at Oldenburg and a FIPRESCI citation at Tromsø, and it has kept circulating through festivals from Marrakech to Shanghai. At home it reached cinemas before arriving on Netflix, and its international rights were picked up for distribution well beyond central Europe.

Spanish audiences get their turn next. El coro de Praga, as the film is titled in Spain, opens in Spanish cinemas on 21 August 2026, more than a year after its Czech bow. Whether it draws the crowds its festival laurels suggest or the wariness its subject earns, it arrives as one of the most quietly unsettling European dramas of the season — a film that makes a room full of children’s voices sound like a warning.