‘The History of Sound’ review: A quiet romance shaped by music and circumstance

The History of Sound is a quiet, deliberately paced film about missed chances and unresolved lives. Directed by Oliver Hermanus and adapted by Ben Shattuck from his short stories The History of Sound and Origin Stories, the film traces one man’s journey through music, memory and emotional restraint.

The story opens in rural Kentucky in 1910, where Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) grows up on a farm dutifully following in his family’s commitment to physical labour, finding release through song. “It never occurred to me that music was only sound,” Lionel reflects, a line that establishes music as something far larger than art. It is also a means of survival, a repository of memory, and conduit for connection. When a local teacher recognises his singing ability and helps him secure a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, the opportunity briefly lifts Lionel out of a dead-end life.

Boston in 1917 brings both expansion and tremors. A chance meeting with David White (Josh O’Connor), a fellow student whose openness and curiosity balance Lionel’s introspective confinement, evolves into a relationship that develops quietly, marked by shared listening rather than confession. A stoic, deeply restrained love story, which is never given language or definition, but in which Hermanus allows intimacy to exist in glances, harmonies and silences. Thus creating something fragile and believable for its setting.

The First World War abruptly disbands the conservatory class, and David is drafted. The war is not dramatised through combat but through absence. The war puts Lionel’s emotional life on hold, pulling him back to Kentucky and the familiar weight of responsibility. Caring for his ageing parents and working the farm, he slips quietly into a life shaped by duty, with music and love pushed to the margins.

From here, the film settles into an unhurried, despondent rhythm that may test some viewers’ patience. The undeniably languid pace, and at times its devotion to mood, risks inertia. If American folk music or post-World War I rural America hold little appeal, the film can feel like a trudge.

In 1921, Lionel and David reunite briefly to travel and record folk songs, capturing voices and histories that might otherwise disappear. These sequences underscore the film’s broader themes—how American music carries the weight of war, the legacy of slavery, inherited trauma etc. The songs are not romanticised; they are heavy with memory. Music is as much a character as any human presence, carrying a persistent undercurrent of melancholy.

By 1923, Lionel is in Rome, only to be ghosted by David, another disappearance without explanation or closure. Lionel’s life becomes a series of movements: in 1924 he moves to the UK and becomes a music conductor; later he returns to the US, and in 1927 travels to the Lake District, UK. These shifts feel less like progress and more like restlessness, a quest for closure. Lionel is constantly seeking, haunted by something unresolved, circling the absence at the centre of his life.

The film finally arrives in Boston in 1980, where an older Lionel (Chris Cooper) reflects on his life’s work collecting music. Cooper’s performance adds quiet weight. Paul Mescal’s performance anchors the film with remarkable restraint, while Josh O’Connor’s David feels both present and yet out of reach. Their relationship and on-screen chemistry embody a love shaped as much by history as by music, feeling and timing—could, and should, have been.

In the end, The History of Sound moves at its own unhurried pace, lingering on silences, routines, and folk songs that carry specific cultural histories rather than broad appeal. Its carefully built music-scape, steeped in early American folk traditions, gives the film its atmosphere (particularly the Irish-English folk song ‘The Unquiet Grave’), but also limits how inclusive it feels. Either way, the film is confident in its choices, content to let the music and its lead actors do the heavy lifting, as Lionel and David fight battles both externally and internally.

Udita Jhunjhunwala is a writer and curator.