The History of Sound, from director Oliver Hermanus and writer Ben Shattuck, was met with a somewhat chilly critical reception at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Much-anticipated due to its buzzy stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, the film’s deliberate pacing and carefully calibrated restraint frustrated some critics. Possibly a problem of misaligned anticipation — there seemed to be a general expectation that the film would be a rapturous romance, rather than the largely interior memory piece it proved to be — the ambivalent response puts Hermanus’ film at risk of being dismissed as just another tragic gay period drama (as if this still-marginal microgenre has ever oversaturated the cinematic landscape). Yet to place the film in this pre-determined box would be a mistake, because The History of Sound is an uncommonly sensitive and insightful film. By patiently following the lifelong reverberations of a brief, intense romance, Hermanus and Shattuck sift through the never-complete drive to preserve, even revive, our closely held treasures of the past before they fade away.
Lionel (Mescal), the child of Kentucky farmers who has been endowed since childhood with vivid synesthesia and natural vocal ability, is a student of vocal performance at a conservatory in Boston in 1917. At a bar populated by his peers, he is surprised to overhear another student playing and singing a familiar tune from his rural childhood on the piano. This young man, David (O’Connor), is a charming composition major with a passion for “collecting songs,” meaning he traverses remote regions to gather and learn their local songs. The two instantly bond over folk music, and that night they have sex in David’s sparsely decorated apartment. Their emotional bond grows progressively more intimate as they continue to meet weekly, only for their affair to end abruptly when David leaves for Europe to fight in World War I. The United States’ entry in the war leads to the indefinite cancellation of classes, so Lionel reluctantly returns to the family farm.
At the war’s end, Lionel unhesitatingly accepts an invitation from David to accompany him on a song-collecting trip throughout Maine. Lionel and David record the songs of Maine’s villages and farms with a wax cylinder phonograph, and they spend many of their nights camping in the woods. The wintry trip through the woods and villages of Maine is idyllic, but David, subtly traumatized by his experience on the frontlines of war, grows distant toward the end of the trip. Lionel’s subsequent letters to David go unanswered, and he eventually leaves Kentucky to pursue a distinguished career in choral music — yet as he grows older, the memories of his trip with David somehow grow ever-more present as their time together recedes into the past, spurring him to re-evaluate how he wants to live.
Though bookended by a prologue and epilogue — where an older Lionel is played with moving emotional immediacy by Chris Cooper — The History of Sound has a two-act structure, first following the development of Lionel and David’s relationship, then following Lionel’s searching, solitary life in the years to come. The structure is more chronological and incremental in narrative progression than that of the source material, a short story of the same name also written by Shattuck, and Hermanus guides both halves with a steady pace and a slow accumulation of detail. Hermanus and Shattuck’s approach may be patience-testing for some viewers, but it is essential for achieving the film’s considerable emotional effect: Lionel and David’s relationship is tender and endearing from the first, but as time passes and a reunion becomes progressively less plausible, the seismic impact of David on Lionel’s life becomes increasingly apparent, and the weight of the loss grows heavier, until Lionel realizes that this brief episode of his youth gifted him happiness he will never feel again. Hermanus, who inflected his 2022 film Living with comparable quietude and emotional depth, thus guides the viewer confidently toward a deeply felt, diligently earned catharsis.
Mescal’s performance, so essential to the film, at first verges on inscrutability. Lionel is a tricky character, reserved and reactive, and his most immediately apparent characteristic — his exceptional vocal talent — proves to be a struggle for Mescal to fully embody, as his expressive singing voice is more pleasant than virtuosic. Yet Mescal has successfully embodied even more inscrutable characters to poignant effect in Aftersun and All of Us Strangers, and he draws on his most reliable attributes as an actor to provide similar weight and texture to Lionel. Portraying a character defined by a gift but without any intrinsic sense of purpose, and whose natural tendency to live in the present moment slowly gives way to encroaching, devastating reflections on the past, Mescal’s abilities to listen to his scene partners with his full body and mind, and to react in the moment with instinctual emotional truth, serve him exceptionally well.
O’Connor, much more of a behavioral actor than Mescal, is the perfect counterpoint. As O’Connor plays him, David is charismatic, sometimes verging on camp, and he emanates a low-level nervous energy through gestures like constantly fiddling with cigarettes and putting on amiable, yet somehow uncomfortable-seeming, smiles. He breezes through his dialogue at a fast clip, particularly when discussing emotional hardships, and the overall effect is that he is a natural charmer who is, maybe constantly, concealing a deep well of pain. When, emotionally brutalized by war and, implicitly, struggling with shame and anxiety over his homosexuality, David eventually retreats into himself, O’Connor’s slide into much more visible uneasiness has an intense impact, and echoes throughout the film.
Sparks of vivid life amidst struggle abound in The History of Sound. Director of photography Alexander Dynan repeatedly emphasizes flashes of light from small, unassuming sources amidst a generally muted palette, spirited songs of devotion and betrayal uplift the often-beleaguered people Lionel and David encounter, and, within the long narrative scope of Lionel’s life, the joy of a month-long trip to Maine is a never-dimmed flame. David’s devotion to the preservation of songs passed down through generations echoes in Lionel’s life. “What happens to it all, all the sounds released into the world, never captured?” says Lionel in voiceover. The act of preservation, even of just remembering, is to fight against this ephemerality, to re-illuminate lights that have been permanently snuffed out. Hermanus tangles with this contradiction with unsparing, yet tender insistence, and the film resultantly lingers in one’s memory long after its conclusion.
DIRECTOR: Oliver Hermanus; CAST: Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Chris Cooper; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; IN THEATERS: September 12; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 8 min.
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