"The History of Sound" (2025)

I occasionally attend “sneak peek” screenings at our local theater. You buy a ticket without knowing what movie you are going to see. Since I do not get to the theater all that often anymore, I usually hope the mystery film will be something already on my radar. This time around, I suspected there was a decent chance it would be one of two new horror films I had been wanting to check out.

Instead, the screen lit up with “The History of Sound.”

It was not a movie that would end up getting my recommendation.

The film is undeniably well crafted. The cinematography is beautiful. The music is excellent. The performances are thoughtful. It is the kind of movie critics often describe as “haunting” or “meditative.” Unfortunately, beneath all that craft is a story that I found deeply frustrating.

The film follows Lionel, a gifted but passive farm boy who studies music in college and begins a brief affair with another young man named David. Their relationship is interrupted by World War I, but resumes later during a summer journey recording folk songs across rural America. Afterward, Lionel drifts through Europe and through a series of short-lived affairs with both men and women, never forming meaningful attachment to anyone because he remains obsessed with David.

Years later, after his mother dies, Lionel finally seeks him out again only to discover that David committed suicide long ago, apparently struggling with PTSD. He also discovers that he never truly knew him at all. David had been married, even during the idyllic summer that Lionel had mentally preserved as the defining relationship of his life.

The film presents all of this as a profound meditation on love and longing. But what it actually depicts is dissatisfaction, projection, and emotional paralysis.

Lionel is one of the most passive protagonists I have seen in years. He does not build a life. He does not meaningfully pursue anyone around him. He simply drifts from encounter to encounter while preserving an idealized memory of a man he barely understood. The tragedy is not merely that the relationship ended. The tragedy is that Lionel mistakes obsession for love and nostalgia for meaning.

Modern films often romanticize yearning itself. Unfulfilled desire is treated as spiritually profound while ordinary faithfulness and commitment are depicted as compromises. The History of Sound falls squarely into that trap. The movie mistakes emotional intensity for depth.

What makes the story especially sad is that the revelation about David should have shattered Lionel’s illusions. He eventually learns that the “great love” he devoted his life to was built partly on fantasy. David was not the idealized figure Lionel preserved in memory. He was a complicated and hidden man living an actual life beyond Lionel’s imagination.

But the film does not seem interested in that realization as a moment of awakening or repentance. Instead, it treats Lionel’s fixation as noble simply because it endured.

There is an irony at the center of the film that I do not think it fully understands. Lionel spends his life recording and preserving folk songs, music rooted in community, memory, family, and shared human experience. Yet he himself never truly participates in community or builds enduring relationships. He becomes a collector of echoes instead of a participant in life.

The result is a beautifully photographed tragedy about a man who confuses longing with love and spends his life worshiping a memory that is a lie and an idol.