The History of Sound review: Tender love story will deepen Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal's fanbases

Premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, The History of Sound begins, briefly, in 1910, as Mescal’s Lionel narrates about his unique appreciation of music. “I thought everyone could see sound,” he intones. But it won’t be for another seven years that he meets a man who is similarly in tune with sound. In a bar one night, David (O’Connor) is playing a piano. They will soon become firm friends and more.

David, we learn, grew up in Newport, then London, and comes from a wealthier background than Lionel, who was raised up on a poor farm in Kentucky (one he still is expected to help out on). His poor eyesight means that he avoided the draft, to fight in the trenches of the First World War. But David heads to what he wryly calls his “walking tour of Europe”, thankfully returning unscathed.

When he does, these two young men reunite in Maine and decide to venture cross-country, recording folk songs for the preservation of America’s heritage. The college where David works has bankrolled the project, and David decides that he needs Lionel to collect the songs on wax cylinders. Mescal’s Lionel also tutors young kids in the science of sound and vibration.

At this point, as David and Lionel grow closer, you could be forgiven for thinking the film has the air of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain about it, a period gay romance (a ‘Folkback Mountain’, if you will). But, adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story, the film takes an intriguing turn when the two men separate and David no longer returns Lionel’s letters.

The story continues on, with Lionel taking centre stage, even with a sojourn to England, where he meets a young lady from a welcoming, well-to-do family. Is he suppressing his real sexuality? Like so much of this film, it’s left unsaid, with the South African-born Hermanus adopting the same delicate approach that he deployed on Living, the 2022 film he made with an Oscar-nominated Bill Nighy about a bureaucrat who receives a terminal diagnosis.

More reviews from the Cannes Film Festival:

• Die My Love review: Jennifer Lawrence is superb in this absorbing and quietly devastating drama
• The Phoenician Scheme review: Wes Anderson's latest is a quaint tale of industrial espionage
• Eddington review: Ari Aster's latest is thematically rich but overlong

Mescal, who has already been a part one brilliant gay-themed drama (Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers), truly sinks into his role here as a man unable to forget the soul that touched his life so deeply. Hidden behind his ovular spectacles, he’s almost unrecognisable at first, until the character comes out of his shell. There’s also a lovely surprise in the end, as Chris Cooper (the marvellous actor of Adaptation fame) pops up to play Lionel in scenes set much later in his life, where it’s clear music has remained his passion.

Hermanus accompanies this moment with Joy Division’s haunting song Atmosphere, a truly unusual choice following the folk songs that populate the earlier part of the movie.

While this isn’t a film that’ll have you sobbing, it’s an increasingly touching love story, one that deserves its place at the heart of the LGBTQ+ cinematic canon. A movie that draws you in gradually, you may even quiz where its going at the halfway point. But Hermanus and Shattuck carefully layer the story with emotional bear-traps; by the end, you will be ensnared.

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