It feels like just yesterday that Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor were catapulted into our collective consciousness, cementing themselves as present-day heartthrobs. Mescal broke through with the romantic drama series Normal People and coming-of-age indie Aftersun (2022), while O’Connor’s appearance in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers sealed his status as one of the hottest rodent men of 2024 after appearances in gay romance God’s Own Country (2017) and historical drama series The Crown as Prince Charles. Since their respective debuts, both actors have glided between arthouse and mainstream, their faces becoming shorthand for millennial melancholy and emotional repression.
Now, in Oliver Hermanus’ latest queer melodrama The History of Sound, which enjoyed its world premiere in the main competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival to a nine-minute standing ovation (matched by La Chimera and Emilia Pérez, for comparison), the two actors finally meet onscreen, bringing with them a reservoir of pre-existing affective investment from their fans. Whether or not the film itself earns that investment is a more complicated matter. Whether the anticipated intimate scenes were steamy enough for the public is also debatable.
Adapted by Ben Shattuck for the screen from his short story of the same name, The History of Sound unfolds in early 20th-century United States. David (O’Connor), a composition student, meets Lionel (Mescal) at the Boston Conservatory in 1917. Their romance begins quietly and almost imperceptibly, with a kind of encoded intimacy that reflects the social situation of the time. Even after David is called to serve in World War I, the pair later reunites for a journey through rural Maine, with a mission to record folk songs with wax cylinders–a recording technology invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. That brief and tender interlude is ultimately short-lived and they go their separate ways right after.
Equally refreshing and devastating is that the film never falls into the trap of rewriting history with a feel-good arc. There is no triumphant third act where love conquers time, war, or societal constraints. Instead, Hermanus is fully committed to a kind of realism that’s far more brutal: a love that remains unspoken, undefined, and unresolved. This restraint is reinforced by Alexander Dynan’s cinematography, bathed in sepia tones and filled with long, static compositions akin to the period of general muteness. There’s a loneliness to it all: wide empty frames, hushed interiors, and landscapes that support the characters and their sense of solitude. The visual language gives the emotional tension room to linger, forcing the audience to sit in the bitter in-between moments.
All that said, Hermanus’s directorial vision lacks cohesion. His body of work, from the semi-autobiographical Moffie to the Oscar-nominated and Bill Nighy-led Living, feels more an assortment of genre exercises than an ever-developing auteur voice. The History of Sound gestures toward an epic but never quite lands; the emotional core is often overwhelmed by mood, tone, and the heavy lifting of its actors.
Throughout the film, I found myself constantly reflecting on what the film would be if Hermanus had casted unknown actors in the roles. Would its plot still hold? Lose Mescal and O’Connor, whose performances are nuanced and deeply felt, and what remains feels thin and awfully boring. Without their familiar melancholia, the narrative verges on repetitive agony that will leave viewers on two opposite ends of a spectrum of cinematic enjoyment. Once again we have Mescal, who plays a tortured soul unable to escape death and grief, a character so closely aligned with his brand it now borders on typecasting, maybe even too similar to his role in All of Us Strangers (2023). AndO’Connor, who has it slightly better, his character more emotionally ambivalent, but even he seems to get lost in the well-worn persona.
Collecting songs and singing together are the only ways the two protagonists can publicly communicate with one another. There are moments of profound non-verbal, slow-burning, almost ghostlike intimacy that manage to touch the viewer. These are the film’s greatest strengths: its refusal to scream when a whisper will do and its recognition of what cannot be said. The tragedy here isn’t just personal: it’s systemic, generational, historical. The characters’ inability to name their love is both a testament of the times and a necessary portrayal of queer identity.
Still, The History of Sound sometimes plays like a poor man’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) in a sepia-filtered alternate universe, where even the worst tragedy is sometimes too tragic. The slow pacing and austere visual palette may charm the fans and the normies, but unfortunately, the Hollywood prestige package is wrapped around a heart that beats a little too faintly this time.
