The History of Sound (Preview)
Reviewed by Megan Feeney

Produced by Oliver Hermanus, Lisa Ciufetti, Thérèsa Ryan-van Graan, Andrew Kortschak, Sara Murphy, and Zhang Xin; directed by Oliver Hermanus; written by Ben Shattuck, adapted from his short story; cinematography by Alexander Dynan; production design by Deborah Jensen; edited by Chris Wyatt; music by Oliver Coates; folk songs arranged by Sam Amidon; starring Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, and Chris Cooper. Color, 128 min., 2025. A MUBI release.

The History of Sound is about the fleeting nature of love and life itself, the pain this inflicts on human souls, and our impulse to fight against it. To advance these themes, writer Ben Shattuck and director Oliver Hermanus fruitfully mine the metaphoric potentials and practical artifacts of American ethnomusicology, which is the academic field of the film’s protagonist and his lover. In the film’s central episode, Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) and David White (Josh O’Connor) set out through the woods of Maine in 1920 to record folk songs with a portable Edison phonograph that etches soundwaves onto wax cylinders, endeavoring to preserve for posterity the ephemera of centuries-old, ever-evolving, orally transmitted ballads.

In his short story of the same title first published in 2018, Shattuck invented a fictional song over which his lovers initially bond: “A Dead Winter’s Night,” which is “about a man and a woman lost in the woods, having run from their homes to elope,” as the story describes it. For the film, however, Shattuck and Hermanus avail themselves of real songs compiled by real ethnomusicologists of the early twentieth century, many of the songs since made famous by the folk revival of the Sixties and Seventies. Significantly, this is an archive of songs replete with star-crossed lovers and heartbroken souls mourning lost objects of their undying affection. Their melodies and lyrics help set the film’s bittersweet tone and foreshadow the tragic plot.

The film opens on the image of a boy on the banks of a Kentucky river in 1910. The voice-over gives us to know that this is young Lionel Remembered by an elderly Lionel Remembering; the film unfurling before us will be an extended memory. The voice of Chris Cooper, who plays octogenarian Lionel in the Eighties, as we will see at film’s end, contemplates the God-given gifts that shaped his life: his aural synesthesia (the ability to see, taste, and feel sound) and his angelic singing voice. The latter wins him a scholarship to the New England Conservatory in Boston in 1917, to which the film quickly flashes forward. At a campus bar, Lionel meets David, a composition student who developed an affection for American folk songs while collecting them with his uncle in the British Isles, at their source. Lionel is gobsmacked that David, tickling the ivories, knows the songs of his own Appalachian youth. He is drawn in by David’s rendition of “Across the Rocky Mountain,” a mournful tune about the persistence of memory and a True Love felled by war. In turn, David is gobsmacked by Lionel’s singing of “Silver Dagger,” about forbidden love and being left “alone to pine and sigh,” an aching ballad made famous by Joan Baez.

The two men fall in love “at first sound,” and fall into David’s bed. The initial sexual encounter, like subsequent ones, is only glancingly portrayed. Some weeks later, in a moment of (implied but fully clothed) postcoital bliss, David tells Lionel his life story (an orphan from Newport). This includes the bit about the uncle, with whom David discovered “The Quiet Grave” on a tour of England’s Lake District. It is, as David explains to Lionel, a tune about “a man, sitting on a gravestone, not letting his dead lover rest. She gets annoyed by all his weeping and tells him to just, ‘Leave her alone. Let her be dead’…She tells him to enjoy life while he has it.” “It’s a good lesson,” David insists, before tussling Lionel’s hair like a kindly schoolteacher. It is also, in a nutshell, the lesson of Hermanus’s previous film, Living (2022), a reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) reset in Fifties London. Hermanus’s Living is about a staid old British bureaucrat (Bill Nighy) whose terminal cancer diagnosis prompts him to do some actual…well, living.

If you’re getting the sense that the thematic use of the lyrics in The History of Sound is heavy-handed, you’re not wrong. And if you’re getting the sense that Hermanus goes out of his way to emphasize Lionel and David’s spiritual connection more than a physical one, that’s true, too—a real disappointment to horny corners of the Internet that lit up when it was announced that Mescal and O’Connor were cast as lovers. This titillating promise of sexual heat (still teased in the film’s marketing poster) was only enhanced by the film’s helming by Hermanus. An openly gay South African director, Hermanus’s films before Living were Beauty (2011), about a closeted middle-aged Boer man, and Moffie (2018), about a South African teenager suppressing his homosexuality while completing his compulsory military service. Both these films are rife with lustful gazes and forbidden physical intimacy, graphic in Beauty, gentle and sweet in Moffie.

In The History of Sound, Hermanus downplays physical desire and eschews sex scenes as part of his bid to weave the romance between these two souls—only incidentally contained in male bodies—into the Americana of all these canonized songs about heterosexual love and heartache. This is an intentional assertion against a conservative version of the “Great” American past, devoid of homosexuality (not to mention devoid of structural racism, to which we’ll return momentarily). Hermanus has said he wanted to treat homosexuality as “matter-of-fact,” essentially taking Lionel’s position of not “worry[ing]” about it, as he says in the one explicit conversation he and David have about “what we’re doing.” This is a sentiment taken straight from Shattuck’s similarly (near-)sexless short story: “I didn’t experience the guilt that some men in my time would have,” Lionel narrates. “I just loved David, and I didn’t think much beyond that.”…

To read the complete article, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Winter 2025 issue, or order a copy of this issue.

Megan Feeney has a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota and is author of Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959.

Copyright © 2025 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 1