A highlight of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival Competition section, The History of Sound is a low-key, movingly sensitive queer love story taking place in early 20th-century New England. Directed and produced by South Africa’s Oliver Hermanus and based upon Ben Shattuck’s moving short story, the film stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in career-making performances as two music students whose love affair is ignited by their passion for folk music and torn asunder by the tragedy of World War I. Exquisitely composed with painterly visuals and sublime music sequences and driven forward through low-key emotional force, The History of Sound is a treasure film that lingers in the senses far beyond the final credits.
A love born in music
The film is about Lionel (Paul Mescal), a Kentucky boy with a unique ability to hear music in everyday noises—his mother’s hacking fit, the barking dog, or the frog croaking. A singing competition wins him a scholarship at the New England Conservatory in Boston and his meeting with David (Josh O’Connor), an urbane pianist from Newport with a hobby of collecting obscure folk tunes. Their meeting is sparked over one night in his bar when Lionel hears David play a childlike Kentucky tune from his youth. Their passion for music turns their love affair romantic with none of the shame and fear in their era.
Hermanus’ Moffie (2019), so incisively and Living (2022), so meditative, builds a narrative in favor of emotional truth over melodrama. From Shattuck’s own short story adaptation, the film takes the music as the beat and rhythm of the love affair between Lionel and David. Their first encounter, during which Lionel performs the bittersweet love song “Silver Dagger,” the love ballad forewarning the dangers of love, is the overture to the love affair—simultaneously timeless and unique to the folk music they both share a passion for.
A Visual Tapestry of Aesthetic and Self-Control
Visually, The History of Sound is a masterwork of classic filmmaking. Director and cinematographer Alexander Dynan and Hermanus collaborate to evoke the spare, suggestive landscapes of Andrew Wyeth painting. The film’s stunning compositions—fields of snow, fireside-lit taverns in warm gold, weathered Maine cottages—imbue the narrative with the touchstone quality of a painting. Muted sepia tones early in the film reinforce period atmosphere without overwhelming the actors, and Oliver Coates’ string score dissolves with the folk melodies into a leisurely weave of regret and longing.
The pacing of the film, though, may strain the patience of a few viewers. Weighing in at 2 hours and 7 minutes, its unhurried pace prompted walkouts at its Cannes press screening, reports The Hollywood Reporter. The measured pace allows the emotional undertows room to find their depth and richly repays those who surrender to its understated grace. Unlike the similarly likened-to Brokeback Mountain (2005) by Ang Lee, The History of Sound draws less upon the narrative destiny and more upon music and memory as spiritual capital and is rather a new and deeply romantic addition to the queer cinema canon.
Tales That Break the Heart
Mescal and O’Connor are the emotional center of the film, two of the more gripping actors working today. Mescal, whose unfettered sensitivity in Aftersun (2022) won universal critical acclaim, applies dry intensity to Lionel. Unspoken sadness is more often than not in his eyes and bears witness to the depth of the love upon which his life is organized. O’Connor, who broke out from roles in Challengers (2024) and The Mastermind (2025), adds a reserved quick wit to David, whose worldliness conceals a nascent wariness as world-imposed expectations intrude.
They have electric and sensual chemistry, particularly in those moments when music bridges physical and emotional intimacy between them. One memorable moment early in their courtship is when David playfully spits a mouthful of water and Lionel takes it directly to his tongue—a moment that expresses the play and abandon of their love. Subsequently, when they’re journeying through the Maine woods in 1919 and are recording folk songs onto a cylinder of wax, the feeling they share of purpose and stolen glances and touches while lost in the woods transcends time and creates a feeling of timeless intimacy.
Supporting turns add depth to the film. Molly Price is fine and forceful in her role as Lionel’s streetwise mother, and Briana Middleton shines as Black singer Thankful Mary Swain whose rendition of the hit song “Here in the Vineyard” is a show-stopping moment. Chris Cooper appears late in the film as older Lionel in 1980 and adds weight to the pivotal scene that ties the story up with sheer emotional force.
Music as Memory and Resistance
The use of folk music is the film’s most unconventional feature, taking the film out of the category of period romance. The use of songs such as “Silver Dagger,” “The Unquiet Grave,” and “Here in the Vineyard” is not window dressing but a storytelling pillar that captures the characters’ feelings and the cultural heritage of the time. These ballads are performed with abandon by O’Connor and with teeming passion by Mescal and cover the parameters from love song to murder ballad and are saturated with the gravitas of oral tradition. The taping of the songs in the countryside of Maine is a gesture towards preservation and captures the lovers’ need to maintain their temporary bond.
One important narrative extension of Shattuck’s tale is the excursion to Malaga Island, where Lionel and David are seeing a community that is being uprooted by the state. The subplot, fueled by the actual impetus of Malaga’s 1912 removal, adds social commentary, broaching the situations where race and class converge and the disenfranchised are to be found. The struggle it then prompts the lovers to engage in—Lionel’s need to do the right thing and David’s resignation—becomes a turning point, transforming their dynamic in small ways and foretelling their eventual break-up.
A journey through time and grief
The second part of the film goes beyond Shattuck’s story, tracing the path of Lionel’s life after his meeting with the mysterious David. His sojourns in Rome, where he is welcomed into a world-renowned choir, and Oxford, where he struggles with a doomed love affair with a Venetian vocalist (Alessandro Bedetti) and a catastrophic one with a bohemian heiress (Emma Canning), at times drag the pace. These diversions are intended to highlight Lionel’s failure to regain the happiness he experienced in Maine, and Mescal’s performance holds the film’s emotional trajectory together.
Act three in 1980 discovers Chris Cooper playing the mature Lionel, a renowned ethno-musicologist. A TV interivew about his newly published folk music history prompts the enigmatic gift—a souvenir from years before—that precipitates a horribly sad moment at the keyboard. This while memories flash before his eyes about David is a tribute to the success of the film in depicting overwhelming sorrow and enduring love without wallowing in melodrama.
A landmark work of queer cinema
A History of Sound excels in its avoidance of wallowing in the repression or shame typical in queer period drama. There is pressure there—particularly in David’s increasingly guarded demeanor—but the film cares less about that than it does about the authenticity of the couple’s love, forged through the common adoration of music that unites them. That and its rich theatre and transportive score make it the most unabashedly romantic queer film in years.
Hermanus’ guidance navigates the refined artistry and raw emotional honesty tightrope with the finesse of a seasoned acrobat. Every player in the cast, ranging from the lead actors to the small but indelible supporting roles, adds depth to the smallest moment. North American Mubi releases and Focus Features international releases ensure far-reaching coverage with the hope of resonating with audiences hungry to experience love, loss, and heritage-driven stories. Closing Thoughts: A Song That Persists Despite all its incandescent intensity beneath the surface, The History of Sound is a deeply affecting film whose rewards belong to those willing to absorb its measured pace and soulful undertows. Comparisons with Brokeback Mountain are unavoidable, and yet Hermanus’ movie blazes its own trail through the landscape, using music as a metaphor for love’s sonic echo. Mescal and O’Connor deliver performances of electrifying depth, and the folk ballads they sing form a soundtrack of sorrow and joy and resilience.
