Dir: Oliver Hermanus, US/UK/Sweden/Italy, 2025, 128 mins

Cast: Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor

Review by Carol Allen

The History of Sound is writer Ben Shattuck’s first screenplay, based on and expanded from two of his short stories. And maybe that expansion, good looking and well acted though it is, is the reason the film is somewhat slow and ponderous.

Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor) meet as students in Boston in 1917. Lionel is a Kentucky farm boy born with an exceptional musical talent. They meet in a bar where David is playing piano and they bond over their shared love of American folk music.

They are also sexually attracted to each other at a time when same sex activity was illegal and persecuted. But that doesn’t appear to worry them or indeed prevent them from enjoying that activity enthusiastically.

What does however is America’s entry into the First World War, when David is drafted.

Then in 1920 war over David invites Lionel to join him on a trip across the state of Maine to collect the folk songs they both love onto wax cylinders – an early recording technique – and preserve them for posterity. They love the work and resume their relationship but things are not quite as they were before. At the end of the trip they part. David takes the recordings back to the college where he is teaching, Lionel is offered a choirmaster job in Italy and he never hears from David again.

The rest of the film is devoted to Lionel, his choirmaster assignments in Rome and then Oxford, but never able to settle or forget David. And eventually he returns to America to try to find his former lover.

I’m not quite sure why director Oliver Hermanus decided to cast two non Americans in the leading roles but both Mescal and O’Connor are exceptional actors and were keen to do the film from its first conception. Though by the time it was actually made they do look a bit on the mature side to play the teenage boys meeting in Boston.

Visually the film not only looks beautiful but also has a very convincing and detailed sense of period. Apart from the two men, there is a delightfully lively performance from Emma Canning as the well born English girl with whom Lionel has an affair in Oxford and then dumps and from Hadley Robinson as the woman who holds the secret of what happened to Lionel and those now lost wax cylinders.

The film’s a bit of a long haul and rather self indulgent but worth sticking it out for the final moments, when we have a very moving solo scene with Chris Cooper as the now elderly Lionel recalling the lost love of his life, as he is finally reunited with those wax recordings made all those years ago.