The History of Sound

(2025, runtime 2h 8m)

In 1917, two young men meet while students at a Boston music conservatory and, discovering a shared love of folk music, grow first close, then become lovers.  Their brief relationship is interrupted by WWI, with one of the pair heading to the battlefields of Europe and the other returning to his struggling farming family in Kentucky.

            After years apart, the two reunite for an exciting months-long trek through the backwoods of Maine, recording and documenting American folk songs.  But the war has taken its toll on the former soldier, who ends the trip suddenly, leaving his partner unsettled and confused.

            The remainder of the film is devoted to examining what happened next, and how a man can be so painfully and inexplicably stripped of the joy he seemed to have been promised in his youth, grieving a love he still clearly remembers having once possessed.  Paul Mescal (Shakespeare in Hamnet) and the celebrated British actor, Josh O’Connor (The Crown and Les Miserables) star.  The film was adapted by Ben Shattuck from two stories in his book “The History of Sound: Stories.”