by Hudson Moura
Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound is a romance written in acoustics. Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor), two conservatory students who first harmonize in a café, are soon pulled apart by history: David enlists; Lionel returns to his family farm in 1917; a father dies in 1918; time eddies and deposits them, separately and together, across Rome (1923), Oxford (1924), the Lake District (1927), and, much later, Boston (1989). The film moves with the measured tempo of a stage play—scenes arranged as chambers for voice, silence, and recollection—and proposes a simple but resonant thesis: sound is invisible yet physical; it touches us, and we touch it, as surely as breath troubles air.
Hermanus and his cinematographer make the image a second narrator. Faces are treated like landscapes, the depth of field breathing from one profile to the other, as if a rack focus could approximate the brush of a kiss. Greys predominate, but not drably; they register as atmosphere and grain—the visual equivalent of patina on a shellac disc. In its strongest passages, the film composes a sensuous dialectic of sight and sound: old songs and beers, field recordings and folk memory, the clicking of apparatus and the warmth of a vowel. You feel the film straining for a cinema of listening—one where attention itself is erotic.
Performance-wise, Paul Mescal offers a grounded Lionel, a man whose reserve reads as a mode of care. However, Josh O’Connor’s David is uneven—at times inflected by a delicate, “feminine” lilt, at others pulled tight—and that variability mirrors the character’s unsettled itinerary but occasionally disrupts the film’s tonal line. Hermanus sometimes corrals the men within frames that “decide” for them—staging that obliges proximity before the script has earned it; at its best, this reads as fate; at its weakest, as a gentle shotgun wedding of mise-en-scène.
The film is attentive to a queer historical imaginary—not only lovers contending with their own existence, but with the existence of a cinema adequate to them. It is no accident that the happiest confession arrives as an archival refrain: “the happiest of my life was the time collecting those folk songs with David.” Love here is preserved less by vows than by recordings; intimacy lives in captions, cylinders, and the minor rituals of documentation. The belated homecoming—after Rome and Oxford—leaves a pocket of absence; melancholy settles as the key signature: in every love story we wonder how our lives might have unfolded had we not met the person we cherish, and those unforgettable moments of sharing and care recede like a distant chorus.
Not everything coheres. The digressions around David’s wife read slow and oddly inert, thinning momentum when the film needs contrapuntal force; some transitions feel dutiful rather than inevitable; and for all its craft, the piece “misses some magic,”—some moments when form should crest into revelation but settles for tastefulness, which seems more appropriate for an ethnographic piece embedded with a critical distance. Yet when The History of Sound trusts its central idea—sound as touch—it acquires a rare tactility: a hand over a microphone, a breath that lifts a phrase, a cut that shifts focus like a caress. The closing sentiments (“sound of my life,” “all the sounds of the world if I have not kept you”) are unabashedly lyrical, but by then the film has earned a little sentiment: it has taught us to listen for what lingers.
Visually rapt and conceptually tactile, if occasionally dramaturgically thin; a romance of listening that trembles the air more than it breaks the heart. This is one of those films, which will make much more sense at the end when the story wraps up.
Rating: 3.5/5