The History of Sound: Muted Melancholy

by Jasmine Edwards

This review may contain spoilers.

The History of Sound (2025) is tender like a burn. I felt warm and wounded after watching it. This resonant feeling reminded me of reading Ben Shattuck’s book, of which this movie is adapted, but also of a few different films. For anyone familiar with queer cinema, The History of Sound is a beautiful blend of Brokeback Mountain (2005), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). The story inspiration and tonal similarities are so apparent that if you’re a fan of any of those three films, I suggest you buy your ticket to The History of Sound now.

I want to begin by explaining that The History of Sound was a profoundly personal viewing experience for me. Not only do I have a musical background and vocal training, I am also a writer, a queer person, and someone who lost a young love to suicide. These combined factors lent strains of breathtaking melancholy to the cinema as I sat with perhaps four or five other viewers in a quiet and darkened room—living someone else’s life in the 20th century while simultaneously reliving my own in the 21st. But this is the experience of music, of hearing a song in your youth and being able to recall the exact emotional state you were in when you hear it again over a decade later.

Director Oliver Hermanus’ period drama is part romance, part musical, and all ache. Just like the first-person point of view does in Ben Shattuck’s book, the film draws you into Lionel’s (Paul Mescal) emotional sphere. His voiceover narration immerses you deeply into his mindset. Like Lionel, we fall quietly and quickly in love with David (Josh O’Connor). The men’s instant connection and understanding plays out in an understated theatrical quality that cannot be praised enough.

Lionel has synesthesia, a perceptual condition which allows you to perceive senses or cognitive pathways simultaneously. In simpler terms, Lionel can see, taste, and hear music all at once. He also has perfect pitch; he can name any note whether it comes from a piano or a babbling brook. In many ways, Lionel’s descriptions and experiences reminded me of Han Kang’s The White Book, a lyrical and poetic exploration of inner pain. For the author, the color white is her floodgate to memory, and Lionel’s is the intangible—yet sometimes physical—sound of music.

David’s photographic memory, then, is the most natural match to Lionel. Their love is so simple, tender, and searingly intimate that it is hardly the central focus of the film. It’s just a fact of these characters’ existence. Yet this love is also everything. It seeps into every scene, from gentle, still shots of soft clouds to wide shots of sprawling North American wilderness. At one point, David remarks that his time as a soldier left everything cold and dull, and next we cut to Lionel’s face behind the glow of the fire: vibrant and alive, everything David could want or need.

While the visuals were my favorite part of The History of Sound, I would be remiss if I did not mention the expert balance of silence and sound. The sound editing, mixing, and design were brilliant. Sometimes we were left in a vacuum, deafened by quiet tears. Other times we strained to focus over a whistling train and constant conversations. Characters remember dialogue or folk tunes and those are then layered over their current scene. This was undoubtedly intentional and another way of pulling the audience so completely into Lionel’s head.

Non-linear storytelling also wraps us into that aforementioned constant ache that Lionel suffers. This romance is happening and it already happened. It is both sad and happy. Ben Shattuck’s short story collection starts with the explanation of the hook-and-chain form in songwriting and poetry. The first and last lines rhyme and the song or poem contains rhyming couplets in between: A BB CC DD EE FF A. Additionally, “The second half of the couplet often completes the sentence or sentiment of the first.”

At the end of The History of Sound, we loop back to Lionel and David’s first meeting. We accept the hurt because it was as inevitable as the joy. A connects to A, the piano chord strikes, and we fade to exquisite black with all our nerves exposed.