The History of Sound review: a tender romance that whispers when it should roar
Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal in The History of Sound
★★½
The , directed with delicacy by Oliver Hermanus, is a tender, albeit timid, romantic affair.
It stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor as two young men who meet at a bar in Boston in 1917, when the former discovers the latter playing a familiar song at the piano.
Lightning strikes.
Soon, they take off on a journey across the American heartland, recording folk songs and exploring forbidden love.
There’s a quiet intimacy at the core of the film, but it's wrapped in so much aesthetic gauze that you begin to wonder if it’s trying to mute its own heartbeat.
The source material — a short story by Ben Shattuck — is slight, and the film stretches it thin over nearly two hours, offering little in the way of surprise.
Mescal plays Lionel, all clenched jaw and repressed emotion, while O’Connor’s David is more poised, more inwardly unravelled, concealing pain beneath a thin sheet of charm.
Mescal and O’Connor do the work here — it’s a job well done, and we’ve come to expect that from these supremely talented actors.
In many ways, this finds both performers in their comfort zones. Neither needs to break a sweat.
Both are capable of great nuance—and they do find moments of unspoken connection that linger—but too often, they're asked to portray longing rather than truly live it.
You can almost hear the director whispering, “Slow it down, make it tragic.” It’s finely curated, sure—but curated to within an inch of its life, leaving little room for exploration or emotional spontaneity.
Admittedly, the film is easy on the eye, with cinematographer Alexander Dynan bathing every frame in nostalgia.
The screen is coated in autumnal browns and frosty blues.
There’s rich Americana too: golden fields, dusty towns, handwritten notes, creaking wood, and scratchy recordings.
However, beauty without bite starts to feel like a trick of the light rather than true emotional substance.
The queerness at the heart of is handled with tenderness — but also with a frustrating level of timidity.
In a post- world, it's not enough to just hint and yearn—audiences now expect filmmakers to go there.
The central relationship (and the audience) deserved higher stakes, more complexity, more mess.
Instead, we get a series of desirous pauses, eyes meeting across campfires, lips almost touching in the dark.
That’s the keyword — almost.
The film almost broke the internet, the audience almost clapped, the film was almost a triumph.
That’s not to say the film is without merit.
It’s a handsome, haunted film that might well devastate a patient viewer in the right mood.
But for this critic, it felt like being handed a love letter that had been sanded down until the words barely registered.
Sometimes, restraint is powerful — as Mescal has proven before.
Other times, it’s just another word for holding back.
