Movie · 2025 · Drama, Romance, Music · 2h 8m · R · English
Curator score: 3.9/10 (81.4K ratings)
Overview
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.
Ratings
Curator score: 3.9/10
IMDb: 6.9/10
Letterboxd: 3.36/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 69%
Metacritic: 64
TMDB: 6.8/10
Director
Oliver Hermanus
Production
End Cue, Film4 Productions, Tango Entertainment, Fat City, Storm City Films, Closer Media
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, Alessandro Bedetti, Michael D. Xavier, Emily Bergl, Aidan Redmond, Aedin Moloney, Leo Cocovinis, Tom Nelis, Brian Hutchison, Briana Middleton
Where to watch
Hulu, MUBI
Curator Review
Verdict
An aching, restrained period romance with strong atmospheric control and a clear love of folk music and archival preservation, but its emotional distance and muted register may leave some viewers cold. It seems to work better as a mood piece and a meditation on memory than as a fully satisfying love story.
Best for
viewers who like quiet, melancholy romances
fans of period dramas with a literary, reflective tone
people drawn to music-centered films about collecting, preserving, and remembering
audiences who appreciate understated queer stories
viewers in the mood for autumnal, meditative cinema
Skip if
you want a passionate or highly dramatic romance
you prefer films with brisk pacing and big emotional payoffs
you dislike restrained, elliptical storytelling
you need a warmer or more overtly romantic tone
Overview
The History of Sound is built on restraint: soft-spoken performances, patient observation, and a deep affection for folk song as something living, fragile, and worth preserving. Its strongest quality is the way it turns listening into a form of longing, making the collecting of songs feel inseparable from the collecting of lost time and lost feeling.
Worth noting
The film’s romance is intentionally muted, which will be either its virtue or its limitation depending on your taste. It has the ache and elegance of a memory piece, but it often keeps its characters at a remove, favoring atmosphere, landscape, and implication over dramatic release.
Bottom line
For viewers who respond to melancholy, archival obsession, and the emotional texture of things half-said, it can be quietly moving. For others, it may feel too cool, too sparse, and too determined to withhold the very catharsis its premise invites.
Top Letterboxd reviews
-ˏˋ mak ˊˎ- (2★) · 5573 likes
this is a sign to stop summoning the same six white dudes to do these sad gay romance movies once a year like it’s jury duty
Jack (3.5★) · 5291 likes
Folk-back mountain
davidehrlich (3★) · 4449 likes
decent as a (very) muted romance, much louder and more effective as an argument for physical archival media.
noen (3★) · 3060 likes
Not perfect, but just depressing enough to ruin my week