Oliver Hermanus has a particular knack for capturing the kind of longing that feels like it’s vibrating just under the skin. With The History of Sound, he’s taken Ben Shattuck’s prose and turned it into a film that feels less like a traditional period romance and more like a fragile, scratched recording of a memory. It premiered at Cannes before making its way to us via Mubi, and while it carries the aesthetic weight of a high-end historical drama, it’s the intimate, almost whispered connection between Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor that keeps it from ever feeling like a museum piece.
The story starts in 1917, in the shadow of a world about to break apart. Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) are students at the New England Conservatory of Music, two young men who find each other in a pub and instantly bond over a shared obsession with folk music. Their connection is immediate and physical, a brief window of warmth before the United States enters World War I. The conservatory shuts down, David is shipped off to Europe, and Lionel is pulled back to Kentucky to tend to a family farm after his father’s sudden death. It’s the first of many partings that define the film, a reminder that in this era, life was often something that happened in the gaps between catastrophes.
When they reunite in 1919, the world has shifted. David has returned from the trenches with a job in Maine and a plan to travel the state capturing folk songs on wax cylinders. He invites Lionel to join him, and the middle act of the film becomes a haunting, beautiful road movie across rural America. This is where the movie really breathes. We watch them move through various walks of life, recording the voices of people whose stories would otherwise be lost to time. There is a tactile, scratchy quality to these scenes, the whirring of the recording equipment acting as a mechanical heartbeat for their rekindled relationship.
Hermanus uses the winter of 1920 in Maine to create a sense of profound isolation. The landscape is beautiful but unforgiving, reflecting the precarious nature of Lionel and David’s bond. They are capturing the "history of sound," but they are also trying to find a frequency where they can simply exist together. It’s a romance built on shared silences and the lyrics of old songs, particularly "The Unquiet Grave," a tune that hangs over the film like a premonition.
However, the war isn't something David truly left behind in Europe. Even in their happiest moments, there is a shadow of shell shock that Josh O’Connor plays with a devastating, quiet fragility. David is a man trying to record the world because he feels his own grip on it slipping. When they eventually part ways again, Lionel moving toward a career in Europe and David returning to his work, the silence that follows is deafening. Lionel writes letter after letter from Rome and eventually Oxford, but the responses never come.
The film takes a melancholy turn as we follow Lionel into the 1920s. He’s a man out of time, living a life that feels like a rehearsal. Whether he’s with a lover in Rome or a socialite in the English countryside, he is visibly overwhelmed by the memory of that winter in Maine. Mescal is incredible here, playing Lionel as someone physically present but emotionally anchored to a past he can’t quite reclaim. It’s a study in the kind of grief that doesn't scream, but rather hums in the background of everything you do.
When Lionel finally returns to the United States to find David, the movie delivers its most crushing blow. He learns from a colleague that the trip they took, the one that felt like the center of his universe, was never actually commissioned by the university. It was a phantom project, a desperate attempt by David to create a reason for them to be together. Even more devastating is the meeting with David’s widow, Belle. She knows exactly who Lionel is, and she reveals the truth about David’s suicide, a final casualty of the war that ended years prior.
This revelation recontextualizes the entire film. Their "History of Sound" wasn't a scholarly pursuit; it was a love letter written in wax. The fact that the cylinders have been missing for decades only adds to the sense of loss. Lionel spends the rest of his life as an ethnomusicologist, a career built on the ruins of that one winter, looking for the voices he helped record.
The technical execution of the film is near flawless. The cinematography captures the transition from the golden light of their youth to the stark, cold reality of the Maine woods, and finally to the polished, lonely halls of Oxford. But the real star is the sound design. We hear the scratches on the wax, the hiss of the wind, and the way voices crack when they sing old songs. It makes the eventual arrival of a package in 1980 feel like a visceral event.
In that final sequence, an elderly Lionel receives the long-lost cylinders. One of them was made on the day of David’s death. Hearing David’s voice apologize and thank him, before singing "Silver Dagger," the very song Lionel sang to him when they first met, is one of the most moving moments in recent cinema. It’s a reminder that sound is a form of time travel, a way for the dead to finally answer the letters we sent decades ago.
The History of Sound is a movie about the price of being remembered. It suggests that our lives are just a series of recordings, some that get played back and some that are lost forever in the dirt. It’s a deeply political and social look at how the trauma of war ripples through generations, destroying the people who survived the bullets but couldn't survive the memories. Oliver Hermanus has made a film that is as quiet and persistent as a folk song, a story that lingers in your head long after the music stops. It is a beautiful, harrowing tribute to the songs we sing to keep the darkness at bay, and the people we hope are listening on the other side.
The History of Sound is now available to own on Blu-ray.
Comments