THE HISTORY OF SOUND* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 11

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE failed as a film because director Mona Fastvold had no interest in the interiority of her characters. By contrast, THE HISTORY OF SOUND fails as a film because the characters are so deeply closeted that their interiority is deliberately withheld to a mere bat-squeak of emotion amidst a tediously attenuated 2hr plus running time.

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor star as Lionel and David, two students at the Boston Conservatoire whose affair is interrupted by World War One.  Bespectacled Lionel returns home to his Kentucky farm to await David’s return from France, upon which they derp around New England recording folk music on wax cylinders. Soon after, the urbane David throws off Lionel and retreats to academia. A brokenhearted Lionel becomes a chorister in Rome and then Oxford, breaking the heart of a boyfriend and girlfriend in turn, before seeking out David once more. All of that is simple enough, but takes the better part of 100 minutes. 

Mescal and O’Connor are, of course, superb actors, and do the best they can with material that asks them to constrain their emotions.  Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Ben Shattuck take the same attitude with the context in which the characters exist.  We think the film might interrogate racism in post-reconstruction America with what might have been a more menacing and significant scene recording some black singers, but no, the film retreats.  We think the film might interrogate class prejudice toward Lionel with his intellectual girlfriend’s minted English family, but once again the film retreats. 

The result is a film about two closeted men that itself feels closeted and afraid. I think it was aiming at profound emotion and catharsis in its epilogue, but instead I was just bored and alienated.  The folk music is rather lovely, as recompense. But if you find that sort of thing enchanting you would be better off watching Bernard MacMahon’s AMERICAN EPIC.

THE HISTORY OF SOUND is rated R and has a running time of 127 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London. It opened in the USA on September 12th.