Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor in a film together? Sold to that salivating wreck at the back of the room. The History of Sound has pulled off a casting coup, that’s for sure. Two of the hotmost of actors right now in the same movie. If you were to take a guess as to what sort of movie that might be – given their CVs of sexy and queer-adjacent stuff – you might go for something like a Brokeback Mountain remake.
And that’s just what this is, dressed up in a different era’s clothes and with the two men committing themselves to the roles as a pair of students who meet at Boston Conservatory in 1917 and bond over folk music, before, in short order, also bonding over mutual sexual attraction.
David (O’Connor) and Lionel (Mescal) not only love to sing the old songs, they are aware that folk music is going to be driven from the face of the earth unless someone saves it. Music becomes their life’s work, at first together, as students, and then separately as fully adult men.
Love endures, even over decades, and the boys can’t help it, those were the lessons of Brokeback and they are the lessons of The History of Sound. David (O’Conor), the more playful and light-hearted of the two, the instigator. Lionel (Mescal), pained and constrained. One who might in time come out, the other who probably never will.
After picking them up in 1917, before the Great War sends David off to Europe to fight, while Lionel, eyesight compromised, remains in the USA, Oliver Hermanus’s tastefully shot film drops in on the men down the decades. Lionel back on the family’s Kentucky farm eking a living out of barren soil while his mother moulders with tuberculosis. The two men on a research trip recording old folk songs on the latest technology – wax cylinders. Lionel and David parting ways, Lionel travelling the world having relationships with beautiful people in beautiful places, David dedicating himself to teaching. After decades apart Lionel eventually heading to Maine to find David for a great reconciliation. Instead he meets David’s widow, who has now remarried to a muscly brute (Michael Schantz), clearly the heterosexual corrective to her first husband.
In the same way that Brokeback Mountain’s best scenes were those with the womenfolk – a change of perspective and a sudden sense of threat altering everything – the best scenes in The History of Sound are between Mescal’s Lionel and Hadley Robinson’s Belle, former wife of David. I’ve seen her before in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Anyone but You and Mountainhead but her performance here is astonishing, time-stopping in the couple of scenes she shares with Mescal. Surely it’s going to open whatever doors Robinson wants to be opened.
Director Oliver Hermanus made Moffie, a film about a gay soldier in the South African army, based on a true story, and he takes pains here to suggest that The History of Sound is a true story too, with a coda near the end – Lionel now played by Chris Cooper – suggesting that the collecting work that David and Lionel did paved the way for the 1960s folk revival and the likes of Bob Dylan.
It’s a sweet and gentle film, with some lovely music. A touch chocolate-boxy maybe, that sepia-equals-old look probably betraying a lack of budget rather than imagination. O’Connor fans may be disappointed that he’s not in it more. For all the joint billing it really is Mescal’s film. His is the character with an arc, who goes places and does things, has the adventures and seems most alive to the idea that singing with other people is one of the real joys of life. Not a bad message.
The History of Sound – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
