The History of Sound: Desire is more studied than felt in this timid romantic drama

• Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

After the first reviews of The History of Sound went online in Cannes, its star Paul Mescal spoke against critics for lazily comparing Oliver Hermanus’s feature to Brokeback Mountain (2005). This seems unfair: Ang Lee’s drama is inescapably the obvious point of reference for a film about two men experiencing passion in a windblown American rural environment. Mescal argued that Brokeback Mountain was about men’s repressed relationship to their sexuality whereas The History of Sound celebrates the love between its heroes. But repression is a very prominent force in Hermanus’s film, an altogether taciturn rather than emotive piece.

Keeping things quiet has been a consistent theme for Hermanus: the closeted patriarch in Beauty (2011); the necessity of keeping a low profile in the brutally homophobic South African army in Moffie (2019); the trap of tight-lipped Englishness in Living (2022). In his new film, everything revolves around words remaining unspoken while music, sometimes accompanied by lyrics, expresses feelings and truths. Adapted by Ben Shattuck from his short story, the film follows Lionel (Mescal, exuding solemn studiousness), a young man from a Kentucky farm whose singing skills land him a conservatoire place in 1917 Boston. One night in a barroom, he bonds with urbane composition student David (a wry, rakish Josh O’Connor) over their knowledge of traditional folk songs, and they become lovers.

War separates them, but David returns from Europe – with, we later discover, more than one unspoken secret — and the two travel around rural America collecting songs and recording them on wax cylinders. 

The film’s central silence revolves around the two men’s separation after their travels. Lionel begins a new life in Europe, and belatedly learns about David’s life away from him, and the things that his seemingly open-hearted companion has never said – including the existence of his wife Belle. In this role, Hadley Robinson gives the film’s most striking performance; her nuanced reticence, with its finely controlled notes of upset, jealousy, possibly distaste, perfectly catches the tone of the film’s own reserve. That dimension is elegantly, if a little over-artfully epitomised in a tableau of Belle’s kitchen, a cigarette left enigmatically billowing smoke.  

What is puzzling is a certain amount that the film itself remains silent about, or neglects to integrate. Lionel confides in an opening voice-over that his perfectly tuned hearing allowed him from boyhood to see the colours of sound, but this theme of synaesthesia – a promising gift to a film-maker, if handled with care – will barely figure.

Similarly elided is the political and ethical dimension of Lionel and David’s investigations, something that has been a key question in discussions of artist and academics collecting folk music in a way that might be seen as museification or appropriation. The issue emerges briefly when the duo visit an island inhabited by ex-slaves and Irish immigrants, who face imminent eviction. The duo feel awkward about being there and eventually make a rapid exit with rueful bad conscience, noting police clustering nearby – but the island is never mentioned again.

It is perhaps this implicitly careless attitude that represents the two men’s essential transgression, although in a flashback to the trip, David asks “Do you worry at all, what we’re doing?” – which could refer either to the pair’s scholarly or amorous activities. Both men embrace heteronormative convention to different degrees – David through marriage, Lionel in an interrupted liaison with an English socialite (an enjoyably flamboyant Emma Canning) – and a love that has transformed two lives becomes the story’s great unarticulated secret, leaving no tangible trace in the world until the pair’s recordings are unearthed.

Always a carefully controlled director, Hermanus here risks ossifying into a specialist in handsome discretion. The period recreation, whether of Oxford, Rome or Boston, is meticulous and convincing, but the travel sequences are in a too familiar, downbeat register of American Rural. David and Lionel may be joyously unrepressed in their time together, and Hermanus certainly does not euphemise the intensity of their love-making; but there is a distinct discrepancy between the pensive elegance of the film’s stylistics and the intensity of the ballads that are so central to the narrative, with their themes of jealousy, grief and murder. It is a notorious tendency of the scholarly folk tradition to place combustible content in neat boxes – literally here, in a crateful of wax cylinders – and much the same happens to the emotional content of this sensitive but excessively decorous film.