Director: Oliver Hermanus
Writers: Ben Shattuck
Stars: Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Chris Cooper
Synopsis: Two young men during World War I set out to record the lives, voices and music of their American countrymen.
We are at the point in 2025’s cinematic calendar where the count has been lost on how many films have focused on the god-given musical genius a character possesses, and why it has the power to change the world. There’s K-Pop Demon Hunters, the animated Netflix smash that takes the meaning of that ability to strike a chord to the next level by positioning its titular pop stars as chart-toppers who moonlight as three sworn protectors of the living realm, those who not only make hits, but deal them out to supernatural entities. The forthcoming Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere promises to handle its musicality in a more straightforward manner, chronicling a specific chapter of The Boss’ life as he changed the rock genre for good with his record “Nebraska” and his unique sound. In fairness, we can’t leave out any number of the many documentaries – Becoming Led Zeppelin; Miley Cyrus’ Something Beautiful; It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley; etc. – that used the lives and fame(s) of its stars to propel a narrative about their trials and triumphs forward. Even The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow made something of an effort to do that, though it also framed Abel Tesfaye as a sad-sack who Jenna Ortega hunts out of love and sport, so do with that what you will. (And, better yet, don’t watch it.)
The film that surpasses them all, not merely in quality but in originality, is Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a theme-laden vampire flick that positions a primary character’s musicality as a gift “so true it can pierce the veil between life and death.” The Blues-loving Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) has something transcendent, a voice so angelic that it calls the devil, too. So it’s no shade to Paul Mescal, who plays Lionel Worthing in Oliver Hermanus’ The History of Sound, that this critic was fairly dubious to hear his voice described in a similar fashion: “A gift from God,” an older Lionel (played by Chris Cooper) narrates at the beginning of the South African dramatist’s latest, noting what Lionel’s late father once called his lyrical abilities. It’s not just that he doesn’t sound like the kind of singer who can conjure spirits, but that his demeanor lacks the verve that the dead might seek to rekindle their long-lost spark for life.
That doesn’t matter too much at the onset of Hermanus’ drama – written by Ben Shattuck from his own book of short stories – when Mescal’s soulbearing singer draws the attention of a similarly tuneful fellow, David White (Josh O’Connor), and the two hit it off over song and sex. It’s wartime in America when these come into contact, so they’re soon sent in opposite directions, David to the battlefield and Lionel to his family’s farm. But as fate would have it, they come back together sooner rather than later, with the former offering an opportunity to help find a musical connection between life and potential death. He pitches a recording project focusing on the music that their countrymen create, specifically those categorized as American heritage songs sung by local Maine-ites and their families. Though they’ll part, reunite, part again, and so on before The History of Sound concludes, this expedition plays enough of a role in the film’s first act to warrant space not just in the film’s logline, but in its core, as it is called upon repeatedly as though the filmmakers were searching for an excuse both to have the men spend time forging an intense, complex bond, and to have an inciting connection to fondly gesture towards each time they reenter each other’s lives.
The History of Sound has already been too-frequently compared to Brokeback Mountain in what Mescal called a lazy and reductive reference that minimizes the impact of both, but it’s not too far off to cite this opening hour as Lionel and David’s own specific version of a summer atop a sheepherding field. It’s far from the only period of the film in which the two have sex – a plot detail that is remarkably restrained and far from the kind of coitus that regrettably attracts most modern audiences to material of this nature – but it’s certainly the foremost of those occasions, the one where each says the least about the true nature of their relationship, as if they ever say much of anything about it. That’s where Hermanus and Shattuck seek to reframe the expectations of this “genre,” as it were, having their film’s central attachment be one that lacks definition, even if it can be clearly read by anyone with sight sharp enough to see that its sexually-confused characters are played by two of the internet’s foremost onscreen boyfriends.
Mescal has more to do here than O’Connor – a shame, considering the cinematic strides he’s made of late, those that have him coming for his co-star’s leading heartthrob crown – but only by virtue of his character being present in the story for a longer chunk of the runtime. Mescal excels most when he’s paired with an equally compelling (and perhaps competitive) dramatic sparring partner – as he had in Normal People with Daisy Edgar-Jones, All Of Us Strangers with Andrew Scott, and Aftersun, despite Frankie Corio being 15 years his junior – and O’Connor provides that target, a luxury if not an absolute necessity. Hermanus and Shattuck attempt to provide him with a few capable replacements, namely Emma Canning’s Clarissa, Lionel’s girlfriend for a spell, but none compare to O’Connor’s David, a sentimental lad whose melodic charisma is a natural match for Mescal’s whispery tenderness; it’s a crying shame when they’re anywhere but together.
Not unlike its directors’ previous two films, 2019’s Moffie and 2022’s Living – the former a gay romance set against a wartime backdrop, the latter an adaptation of Ikiru that tracks a lonely Bill Nighy attempting to discover the meaning of life before his ends – The History of Sound is a work willing to live and die by its emotional heft, and few filmmakers today are as capable as Hermanus when it comes to striking as many varied chords as he strums here. That the whole affair is imbalanced has more to do with its refusal to fully embrace its softer nature as a quality that moves its own needle, not one that hampers its ambitions. It would be wise to follow the leads of its main characters, two ambitious men whose dreams differ from their desires in response to societal expectations, as opposed to misreading its own emotionality as flat, sharp, or muted altogether. The History of Sound is often plain and pitch-perfect; the notes it plays just tend to be staid when they could be stimulating.
