Recommends

When it comes to queer love stories, there can always be the temptation to rely on prejudice, repression or unrequited yearning as the driving force. The LGBTQIA+ community, of course, continues to face immense hardship – but how beautiful for a film like The History Of Sound  to allow the promise and genuine existence of first love to be one of incredible depth?

Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor are no strangers to deeply felt, often painful stories of love lost – but here they get to work in a thoughtful, delicate register as young musicians Lionel and David: two men who meet at the Boston Conservatory in 1917 and travel the backwoods of Maine together as they share an affection for folk music, and for one another. The film, directed with great soul by Oliver Hermanus, takes Ben Shattuck's short story of the same name, and focuses on the immediacy of David and Lionel's attraction and easy bond.

You don't have to worry about a will-they-won't-they, nor about antiquated, homophobic stereotypes that cinema knows all too well. Instead, we see this authentic love story through Lionel's eyes, before, during and after this relationship comes to define his life in an undeniable way. The story came to Mescal and O'Connor before most of the two beloved actors' recent hits: they were all in before Aftersun, La Chimera, Gladiator 2 and Challengers. So if  The History Of Sound feels like familiar territory for them, that's a good thing. All the sensitivity we've come to know and admire from them – whether a young father suffering from depression on a resort holiday in Turkey or a wayward archaeologist searching for his sense of self off the western coast of Italy – started here.  

Hermanus, too, made Living, his lyrical update on Kurosawa's Ikiru, before this film. That project marked his second collaboration with composer Oliver Coates (who also scored Aftersun), whose heart-breaking work here proves vital in bringing the emotion to life through sound – achingly beautiful melodies that stay with you as long as every image of your lost love does. The result? A moving story of two men who never took for granted what they felt for one another, and one man's reflection on how that intimacy – however fleeting and singular – shaped so many other parts of himself. Don't deprive yourself of a beautiful film that will make your heart sing a little louder.   Ella Kemp