The History of Sound, The Art of Listening

The History of Sound is being sold as a World War I drama, but honestly, the war is mostly the studio’s way of tricking straight men into buying tickets to a queer folk-music romance. The trenches are off-screen; what we get instead is something much more interesting: a film about how we record each other – on wax, on paper, in memory – and how those recordings lie, distort and occasionally save us.

Directed by Oliver Hermanus and adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story, the film follows Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor), two music students who meet at the Boston Conservatory in 1917 and later head into rural Maine to capture “the sound of America” on wax cylinders – field-recording folk songs just after the war. On paper that’s patriotic ethnography; on screen it’s really an excuse to put two emotionally constipated men in close quarters with a phonograph and see what happens.

The canon loves a good “forbidden war romance”, but The History of Sound is far more preoccupied with the politics of listening than the logistics of battle. The war is background radiation – a trauma that hums in the distance – while the foreground is filled with songs: murder ballads, spirituals, work tunes, all the messy, contradictory noise of a country that insists on calling itself “one” while being anything but.

Hermanus leans into the idea that sound is memory. The recordings Lionel and David make are ostensibly for an archive, but the real archive is the one inside Lionel’s head: snatches of melody, a voice on the wind, a half-remembered harmony that hits him years later in some Oxford corridor. The film keeps circling back to this simple, devastating idea: it’s not the big historical events that define you, it’s the private noises you can’t get rid of.

Mescal and O’Connor have the sort of chemistry that makes you a bit suspicious of your own television. Critics have already noted how easy and lived-in their dynamic feels, built around shared jokes, sideways glances and that very queer combination of tenderness and self-sabotage.

Mescal plays Lionel as a man whose body is basically a tuning fork – every feeling registers as sound. When he sings (and yes, he really sings; no auto-tuned ghost vocals here), there’s an unpolished vulnerability that makes the musical moments land like confessions rather than performances. O’Connor’s David is more buttoned-up: a brainy, slightly arrogant musicologist who treats folk songs like specimens until Lionel quietly insists they’re people, not butterflies.

The romance is understated rather than torrid – which some viewers will find refreshingly adult and others will experience as “why are these idiots still talking about tonal modes instead of kissing?” Personally, I liked that it refuses to turn desire into melodrama; it’s desire as low, constant hum.

Beneath the love story, the film is obsessed with who gets to tell stories and whose voices are preserved. Lionel and David are literally deciding which songs count as “the history of sound” – whose grief, whose joy, whose politics get etched into the archive. It’s a quietly damning portrait of how nations curate their own myths.

There’s also a meta-story at work: the older Lionel (Chris Cooper, all weary intelligence) has clearly spent a lifetime rearranging events into something he can live with. The narrative structure – drifting between times and places without signposting every beat – mirrors the way memory actually functions: inaccurate, emotional, ruthlessly edited. It’s here that the film really becomes about authenticity. Not the Instagram version (“be your truest self in 4K”), but the harder question: which version of your past are you willing to live inside?

Visually, Hermanus and cinematographer Alexander Dynan go for a soft, candlelit period look – plenty of browns, fog and faces half-lit like old photographs. The landscapes – snow-blanketed fields, creaking farmhouses, chilly rehearsal rooms – feel less like backdrops and more like resonant chambers for the music and the silences between notes.

The sound design is where the film quietly flexes. You can hear the scratch of the wax cylinders, the breath before a song, the environmental noise that creeps into every recording. The contrast between those fragile field recordings and the more polished conservatory music underlines the class and cultural tensions baked into the project. It’s a lovely, nerdy detail: even the imperfections are doing character work.

Here’s where my lefty, mildly impatient side pipes up: The History of Sound is not in a hurry. At all. It’s been described as “meditative” and “restrained”, which is critic code for “some of you are going to check your phones”.

Personally, I found the slowness mostly purposeful – it gives the emotional beats room to reverberate, and the quieter scenes of two men simply existing together feel rare and valuable in a cinema landscape that usually demands either trauma porn or quippy banter. That said, there are stretches where the film seems so terrified of sentimentality that it pulls back right when it should lean in, undercutting its own emotional payoff.

If you go in expecting 1917 with phonographs, you’ll be disappointed. This isn’t a war movie; it’s a queer, melancholic road film about music, memory and the way love becomes a story you keep telling yourself until it finally sounds true. It’s about growth – the awkward, unglamorous kind – and about trying to live honestly in a world built on denial.

For me, the film works best when you treat it like one of the folk songs it records: simple on the surface, quietly radical underneath, full of verses about people history books don’t care about. It’s less concerned with plot twists than with the slow, painful act of becoming yourself.

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