The History of Sound has been a long time coming. News of the project, a sweeping romance that plays out in the shadow of World War I, first reached us back in 2020; it would be penned by Ben Shattuck, from his ravishing short story of the same name. The acclaimed Oliver Hermanus (Beauty, Moffie, and Living, which earned Bill Nighy an Oscar nod) would be its director, and it’d star beloved heartthrobs Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor. After several delays, it has now finally premiered, and at the glitziest of all cinematic showcases: the Cannes Film Festival. It’s almost enough for awards campaigners to start devising their 2026 strategies already, right?
To an extent, yes—although, despite this quartet’s immense talent, this contemplative period piece is, sadly, just not the sum of its parts.
Its setting is a tumbledown farm in Kentucky in 1910, the home of the soft-spoken, musically minded Lionel Worthing (Mescal), who has grown up obsessed with regional folk music. It’s a passion which takes him to Boston in 1917, to study at the New England Conservatory, which is where, at a smoky bar, he overhears a voice crooning a familiar tune from home. The singer is David White (O’Connor), an orphan from Newport and fellow student equally fascinated with the lost songs of cloistered communities. These kindred spirits find solace in each other, and a shy and gentle romance slowly blossoms.
Heartbreak comes shortly afterwards in the form of war, with David deployed to the front and Lionel left behind, on account of his poor eyesight. The latter asks the former to write to him, but he doesn’t—not until a few years later, when David writes from Maine, where he now has a teaching position. He’s been asked, he says, to go on a song-collecting trip through the state to gather an oral history of folk music, which is otherwise at risk of being forgotten entirely. Would Lionel like to join him? He, of course, leaps at the opportunity.
The pair set off through the woods, sleeping in a tent at night, wrapped in each other’s arms, and spending their days capturing tunes on delicate cylinders and creating a formal record of the people, places, times, and traditions they come from. After they part, Lionel writes to David every month, but never hears back. Years later, music takes Lionel to Rome, where he sings in a prestigious choir, and then to Oxford, where he conducts, but David remains on his mind. When he finally makes it back to Maine in an attempt to find him, The History of Sound reaches its emotional crescendo.
The trouble, though, is that the film always keeps its audience at a remove. Even when the stiff-upper-lipped Lionel finally breaks down in this third act, the camera remains at a distance, with a kind of reserve that befits The History of Sound’s period setting but also keeps us from fully investing emotionally. Mescal’s performance is carefully pitched in its quiet devastation, but Lionel, hidden behind his thick glasses and polite manner, is never quite penetrable.
O’Connor, meanwhile, in the smaller but more showy part, combines the urbane foppishness of his young Prince Charles in The Crown with the swagger of Challengers’s Patrick Zweig. He’s a captivating presence onscreen as always, they both are, but they never fully disappear into their respective characters. As with Lionel, David’s trauma is buried deep—his post-war shell shock shown only through a barely perceptible tremor in his hands; his hopelessness only really glimpsed in one close-up. It’s understandable that he doesn’t want to speak about the war, but his reticence, both in his speech and expressions, also has an impact on our understanding of him.
Mescal and O’Connor have a sweet, easy chemistry, but their relationship is mostly shown in snatches, and not as fleshed out as it could be. At one point, Lionel muses that happiness, in itself, doesn’t make for much of a story, which is why there isn’t as much to say about many of his and David’s more joyous interludes. That may be true, but it’s also what prevents us from being as deeply moved by their enduring bond, because we don’t get a real insight into how it was formed in the first place.
Their affair, as it plays out onscreen at least, is also strangely chaste, compared to, say, Mescal’s All of Us Strangers or O’Connor’s God’s Own Country, with the camera often cutting away before stolen moments of intimacy. Again, this is perhaps in keeping with the film’s natural reserve and early 20th-century time period, but it proves more frustrating than tantalizing.
Nevertheless, the two actors hold our attention, and never more so than when they’re singing. When The History of Sound soars, however briefly, it is because of the immense beauty of all of this folk music, mournful ballads and jaunty tales of dastardly deeds, which you’re sure to be humming as you step out of the theater. There’s also one brief scene when we see Lionel and David walking through the forest and duetting absent-mindedly. They’re not even looking at each other, and yet you feel their love, far more powerfully than you do in many of the talkier sequences.
As they go about recording these songs, you can’t help but wish to know more about the people singing them—what are their lives like beyond this single snippet we see of it? We never get answers, though I did at least appreciate the inclusion of Black and Irish voices and histories alongside their white, all-American counterparts.
A special mention should also go to Hadley Robinson, who totally steals a crucial late scene. Mescal and O’Connor have their breakthrough moments, too, naturally, but it’s just not enough to lift the film out of its general mood of bleak and desolate austerity, nor to pierce through the gray patina that seems to hang over everything. At the first Cannes press screening, it resulted in audible snores from across the aisle. When it eventually hits theaters, I’m not sure it’ll fare that much better.
