The false notes are rare in director Oliver Hermanus’ affecting and dustily textured romance “The History of Sound,” written by Ben Shattuck from his own short story about men in love, together and apart, circa World War I and its aftermath. But for a queer love story starring two of the hottest, of-this-moment leading actors around — Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor — “The History of Sound” almost perversely denies your expectations of what a gay romance could be.
The grandiose, sweeping emotional gestures toward repression and latent desire out of something like “Brokeback Mountain” are nowhere here, Hermanus instead following the lonesome Lionel (Mescal) around America’s hidden corners and eventually into Europe for much of this melancholy mood movie.
Mescal and O’Connor play Boston Conservatory music students who meet in 1917, spend winding but limited bouts of time with one another over the years, and on the way to the film’s rueful conclusion. While “The History of Sound” suffers from some pacing issues and detours that turn up as dead ends, following Lionel’s path as a budding ethnomusicologist collecting songs and sounds to record on cylinders, this is a lovely movie capable of wounding and haunting you.
It’s also a vivid big-screen showcase for Mescal. The Irish “Normal People” breakout and “Aftersun” Best Actor Oscar nominee seizes the opportunity for understated emotions that are a far cry from the swords and sandals of his most recent film and franchise debut, “Gladiator II.”
“My father said it was a gift from God that I could see music,” says the older Lionel, played by a wistful Chris Cooper in 1980. “My father would play B minor, and my mouth would turn bitter.” Lionel is revealed to possess a kind of Nabokovian synesthesia that transforms his ear for sound and music into a kaleidoscope of feeling and mental process.
We meet a very young Lionel in Kentucky in 1910 before we’re transported to Boston in 1917, where Lionel’s life course alters when he approaches David (O’Connor), who’s riffing on piano in a smoky bar. They go to bed together in one of the film’s demure nods at sex — I wouldn’t call any of the lovemaking onscreen in “History of Sound” sex scenes per se, besides one scene involving Lionel’s later relationship with a woman (Emma Canning). “The History of Sound” never comes out and says, “These men are gay!,” nor does it strain to depict self-inflicted and necessary repressions of queer men at the time.
Though that’s not to say that Hermanus’ film — closer in tone to the South African director’s 2019 portrait of apartheid-era pining, “Moffie,” than his 2022 looking-back-on-your-life Oscar bid “Living” — isn’t about queer suffering. The draft threatens Lionel and David’s taciturn romance, while Shattuck’s script hinges more on gestures and exchanges than literal declarations of feeling, and both the traumas of war and existential uncertainty about his sexuality and desires eventually plague David. More than, perhaps, they do Lionel. “I don’t worry,” Lionel says at one point. “I admire you,” David responds.
The two men eventually embark on an impromptu journey through the backwoods of Maine to collect American heritage songs sung by the local people, a kind of self-enterprised academic assignment whose aims and goals they aren’t sure of just yet. But it gives Lionel and David time to spend together, in each other’s arms naked in a tent, over a handful of nights and weeks, away from the rest of the world. “The History of Sound” is careful not to reveal too early or too explicitly how much David and Lionel are feeling for each other, though a trepidated departure at a train station tells you what you need to know: “See you next summer?” “Sure.” Lionel shakes in David’s farewell embrace over what could be the last time they see each other. At least for a while. These are the moments when the enormously talented Mescal as Lionel, withdrawn but never holding back, pierces the screen.
Shattuck’s script and story more intimately follow Lionel on his own expedition into a sentimental education. In later years an established music teacher, he appears to have had some kind of fraught relationship or hook-up situation with a European protégé while teaching in shimmery, summery Italy, though the closest he’s able to get to anyone other than David is his girlfriend Clarissa (Canning, in a short but sharp performance), a musician who wants Lionel to meet her parents. Clarissa’s mother warns her to leave him, as Lionel seems to radiate only sadness and a secret within, David probably never not on his mind over the years. (Cinematographer Alexander Dynan gorgeously captures Lionel’s chapter in Europe with all the glimmery tactile feel of a Luca Guadagnino movie, where moments trudging through the American middle-of-nowhere adopt a more muted palette.)
O’Connor gets less of a recognizable emotional arc to work with, though that’s because “The History of Sound” only shows us David through Lionel’s eyes, his memories, the rare and tremulous moments of togetherness they have. Composer Oliver Coates, who coincidentally also provided the ethereal, regret-twinged music for “Aftersun,” writes an original folk score for this film that stands on its own, with Mescal also doing his own singing and evoking a Kentucky accent that’s both boyishly earnest and tentatively coy.
Not all of “The History of Sound’s” second half lands with the same emotional assuredness of the first, as Lionel’s path wends and expands even while ever looking back at David as the one he couldn’t contain in his grasp. That’s partially due to outside social forces that demand their love be kept private, behind closed doors or the canvases of a tent, but Hermanus and Shattuck aren’t interested in piling on that context, which has already been explored in so many other movies more directly. And I speak on behalf of queer audience members such as myself when I say we are, at this point, over it anyway as a storytelling cue.
“The History of Sound” is as plaintive and lilting as a piano note in minor key, never wallowing in its own misery but still keen to explore the psychic sensations, afterglow, and wreckage of a meaningful connection. If the film lacks heat, that’s because Hermanus is committed to making what is decidedly not a Big Gay Sweeping Romance. The emotions flood and hit hard, though, in a final chapter in which Lionel encounters David’s eventual wife Belle (Hadley Robinson, who gives a stirring monologue), who is restless and desperate for company and hopes Lionel will stay for just a little bit longer. There’s a shot of a cigarette left to burn on its own in an empty kitchen that epitomizes Hermanus’ patient gaze, never in a rush to move things (such as things like the course of love) along for the sake of narrative momentum.
When the grown-into-old-age Lionel (Cooper) says he was “never happier than when collecting songs,” what he means is he was never happier than during the times he spent with David. He just can’t come out and say that, forced to live in a closet that “History of Sound” never identifies or addresses, and the film is better for it. The soundtrack takes a bracing hairpin turn when Joy Division’s post-punk epic ballad “Atmosphere” jolts in, a shocking clash against the folk songs prior, songs that almost evoke Arthur Russell, the sound of a man alone in the woods with his thoughts, ruminating over his desires, where it all went wrong or was left unsaid.
“Don’t walk away in silence,” Joy Division’s Ian Curtis sings. Lionel eventually does walk away in silence, but he’s haunted by the sounds and impressions of a romance that was anything but.
Grade: B
“The History of Sound” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI releases the film later this year.
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