Oliver Hermanus, “The History of Sound” (2025)
Based on two short stories by US writer Ben Shattuck who also wrote the screenplay, “The History of Sound” is a historical drama following the lives and relationship between two men who initially bond together through a love of folk Americana. In early 1917, music student Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal), who has grown up surrounded by folk music in rural Kentucky, travels to Boston to study at the arts conservatory there. He meets David (Josh O’Connor) and the two quickly strike up a friendship singing and performing the folk songs of their youth. Their friendship quickly becomes intimate but months after they first meet the US becomes involved in World War I and David is soon drafted into the US Army. Lionel must sit the war out when the conservatory closes – he is ineligible to fight due to poor eyesight – and he returns home to Kentucky to run the family farm after his father dies suddenly. Two years later, he gets a letter from David inviting him to come to Maine to assist his friend in collecting folk songs across the state as part of a college research project. Leaving his mother and grandfather to run the farm, Lionel rejoins his friend and the two range through the countryside on foot, camping or staying with rural communities along the way, recording songs on wax cylinders and renewing their relationship.
Eventually David must return to college, and Lionel plans to travel to Europe to pursue his music career, and the friends part company. Lionel writes to David often but after a year with no reply from David, he gives up trying to correspond with him. In the mid-1920s, Lionel finds work singing in a choir in Rome and then conducting a choir at Oxford University. He has to give up his music work however, breaking off relationships with two lovers Luca (in Rome) and Clarissa (in Oxford) when he receives news of his mother’s ill health; he returns quickly to Kentucky to discover his mother has already died. After settling his family’s affairs and selling the farm, Lionel resumes his search for David, only to discover that David has died several years ago, by his own hand as a result of shellshock from the war, and the whereabouts of the wax cylinders are unknown.
A slow and rather restrained film, “The History of Sound” features very beautiful and atmospheric cinematography. Its attention to detail can be quite meticulous though there can be some flubs as in one scene where wine is served with lunch, during a period in a place when and where Prohibition is in force. As the narrative stretches over a period of roughly 60 years, it does get very patchy once David and Lionel separate. We see Lionel engage in brief affairs with Luca and Clarissa (Hadley Robinson) but the relevance of these affairs to the main plot is vague as the relationships are skimmed over quickly and the characters, distinctive as they are, become no more than moving wallpaper. Part of the problem with the narrative and the character development, leading to the plot seeming rather unfocused and meandering in the film’s second half, is the restraint with which David and Lionel’s relationship is treated by the direction and the script, even though at times during their research, the two men are completely on their own in the forests, detached from the outside world, and free to pursue and express their love for each other. It is understandable that homosexual relationships in the early half of the twentieth century had to be conducted clandestinely, even in more personally private situations, but there are moments in the plot where David and Lionel could have been more uninhibited and intense in their passion. A deeper, more expressive relationship would have contrasted more strongly with the restraint the two men would have exercised in public with each other, and the tragedy of David’s suicide and the loss of the wax cylinders would have been all the more devastating for Lionel.
The film gains strength and substance from its acting leads Mescal and O’Connor, who do sterling work as lovers living in an age in which their love was deemed sinful and could have been severely punished by the law, and from the folk songs and other music featured throughout the narrative. The supporting cast is very strong also: the performance of Briana Middleton as Thankful Mary Swain, singing for her community of former slaves, whose homes may soon be destroyed, is very moving. Themes of loss, regret and the preservation of memory, especially folk memory and culture – and of personal memory too, as a guide to the future life one might pursue – dominate the narrative to the extent that the main characters and their relationship almost end up one-dimensional.
Nevertheless, the film can be deeply affecting and haunting in its atmospheric scenes, and in the way the plot slowly unfurls and finally resolves almost half a century later in the most unexpected way.