The History of Sound
Drama Romance Music English
In 1917, two young music students attending the Boston Conservatory bond over a mutual love of folk music. They reconnect a few years later, embarking on a song-collecting trip in the backwaters of Maine.
| Cast: | Paul Mescal, Josh O'Connor, Molly Price, Alison Bartlett, Michael Schantz, Chris Cooper, Raphael Sbarge, Hadley Robinson, Peter Mark Kendall, Emma Canning, Gary Raymond |
|---|---|
| Director: | Oliver Hermanus |
| Editor: | Chris Wyatt |
| Camera: | Alexander Dynan |
All Guild Reviews of "The History of Sound"
A Quiet Romance Shaped by Music and Circumstance
Oliver Hermanus' film is a deeply restrained love story that allows intimacy to exist in glances, harmonies and silences
The History of Sound is a quiet, deliberately paced film about missed chances and unresolved lives. Directed by Oliver Hermanus and adapted by Ben Shattuck from his short stories The History of Sound and Origin Stories, the film traces one man’s journey through music, memory and emotional restraint. The story opens in rural Kentucky in 1910, where Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) grows up on a farm dutifully following in his family’s commitment to physical labour, finding release through song. “It never occurred to me that music was only sound,” Lionel reflects, a line that establishes music as something far larger than art. It is also a means of survival, a repository of memory, and conduit for connection. When a local teacher recognises his singing ability and helps him secure a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, the opportunity briefly lifts Lionel out of a dead-end life.
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