The History of Sound (2025)

A film that puts its cards on the table from the title onwards ought to be admired for transparency, if nothing else. The History of Sound tracks two young men across 1910s America as they lug primitive recording equipment through rural communities, capturing folk songs before they vanish. Lionel and David are amateur ethnographers with a mission that sounds almost quaint until you remember we’re living through our own version of the same panic. What stays, what goes, who decides.

Oliver Hermanus directs with considerable patience. Not the kind that tests yours, mostly. He favours natural light, washed-out colours, scenes that breathe without gasping for attention. When an elderly woman agrees to sing into their apparatus, the camera holds on her weathered face for what feels like a beat too long. But that extra moment is the point. You see her offering something, sure, but also the faint shadow of loss crossing her expression. The act of recording changes what’s being recorded. Small observation, large implications.

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor anchor the film with performances that feel pleasingly unstudied. Their friendship has texture, the kind you believe developed off-screen before the cameras started rolling. Good thing too, because the script leans heavily on subtext. There’s clearly more happening between these two than the film wants to state outright. Sometimes this reticence creates useful ambiguity. Other times it just feels coy. I suspect the filmmakers knew what they wanted to suggest but couldn’t quite work out how to get there without spelling it out.

The pacing, though. For a film ostensibly about rhythm, it loses its own surprisingly often. The middle sags as similar encounters repeat with less impact each time. You start to wonder if the problem is structural or simply a matter of twenty minutes that should have ended up on the cutting room floor. My sense is probably both. The film can’t decide whether it wants to be observational or narrative, meditative or propulsive, and the indecision shows.

The sound design deserves better than a passing mention. Layered, thoughtful, occasionally brilliant. There’s real intelligence in how absence gets used, how silence speaks alongside sound. It elevates material that on the page might not have warranted the care taken. Sometimes craft can rescue underwritten scenes. This is one of those times.

What works best is how the film refuses to indulge its own nostalgia uncritically. It keeps asking whether preservation honours what it captures or just pickles it. Whether documenting something is an act of respect or possession. These feel like urgent questions for reasons the film sensibly leaves you to connect yourself. We’re drowning in archives now, digital hoarding disguised as cultural memory. The film knows you know this.

But knowing what questions to ask isn’t the same as answering them well. The History of Sound interests me more for its reach than its grasp. Not every film needs to succeed completely to justify itself. Some are valuable precisely because they’re wrestling with something beyond their means. This one falls into that category, I think.

So: three stars. A respectable effort that never becomes the profound experience it’s stretching towards. Worth your time if the premise appeals, but expect a film more compelling in its ambitions than its execution.