THE HISTORY OF SOUND

FOUR STARS Two men travel the back blocks of north America collecting folks songs for posterity. Men whose personal relationship goes far deeper than their professional one.

DRAMA US English #THEHISTORYOFSOUND Starring Paul Mescal, Josh O'Connor

If your idea of a good time is sitting in mone-chrome calm for a couple of hours while a pair of impeccable, handsome men meander through early 20th-century America collecting folk songs, THE HISTORY OF SOUND is the film for you. 

Directed by Oliver Hermanus (2012’s startling BEAUTY), the story follows Lionel (Paul Mescal), a farm boy blessed with perfect pitch who meets David (Josh O’Connor), a charming, privileged student. The latter’s easy confidence contrasts neatly with Lionel’s inwardness and their bond - intellectual, musical and romantic - becomes the emotional spine of a story that drifts across years, geography and unspoken longing. 

Simmering tensions reward those who commit to the unhurried rhythm of the film and the men, and Hermanus commits to a tempo that feels almost sacramental. This isn’t a romance that dances in your heart; it’s the cinematic equivalent of a lesser hymn that unfolds in measured phrases and lingering silences. It's surprisingly emotional.

As the pair travel through the rural back blocks, they record and preserve traditional folk songs before they disappear into the noise of modernity. Their episodic journey gives the film its structure: meetings, partings, shared meals, modest parlours, weather-beaten halls. History intervenes, lives diverge, and Hermanus tracks how a formative relationship continues to echo long after its moment has passed.

Those who crave the shiny, decisive emotional blows of a rom-com will be checking their watches around the one hour mark. This unfolds with monastic restraint, it's a slow burn by design, and the patience it demands is rewarded not with melodrama but emotional accumulation. This may test some viewers’ endurance but if you let yourself be pulled into its cadence, the payoff is found not in plot twists but the accumulated weight of shared glances, dusty roadways, and snow-silenced forests. These are the spaces where Lionel and David define not just the music or their journey but their being. It can be quite profound

Mescal imbues Lionel with a guarded sensitivity that deepens as the years wear on, while O’Connor brings warmth and flickering uncertainty to David, whose apparent ease masks a growing awareness of what cannot be sustained. Together, they create a relationship that feels lived-in, tender. Of course there’s the inevitable echo of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN but their’s is a very different, much simpler, much softer relationship. It refuses easy sentiment but also easy trauma. “Are you ok with - this?” asks David before cheerfully jumping back into bed. Clearly they are.

Music is the unsung character (if you will) whose performances are beautifully rendered and often hypnotic (O’Connor and Mescal sing sweetly for their supper), though it must be said that many of the songs blur together not through any fault of the film, but because this kind of traditional folk music tends toward shared structures and familiar cadences. What sounds repetitious could be considered thematic…

Visually elegant and emotionally precise, THE HISTORY OF SOUND won’t hurry for anyone, but once you surrender to its pace, it rewards you with the rarest of harmonies. With it, Hermanus has created another work of beauty.

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