If Paul Mescal is the body, then The History of Sound is the heart—and gays, I promise, it’s about to beat right into your ribcage. It’s hard to imagine a world in which Paul Mescal isn’t physically dragging a chariot through the sands of Malta or brooding gorgeously under Roman armor. But before the dust could even settle on Gladiator II, Mescal was shedding his muscle mass (and, allegedly, his patience) to play a tender music student in The History of Sound.

“In those last two weeks of the shoot in Malta, when I was still filming Gladiator II, my trainer saw a lot of ugly sides to my hungry self,” he confesses, in a quote that deserves to be printed on a T-shirt and worn while crying softly to folk music. Advertisement Directed by Oliver Hermanus and premiering at Cannes, The History of Sound is not just another period piece—it’s a queer love story wrapped in a folk song, soaked in memory, and stitched together with longing. Imagine Call Me by Your Name if Elio had a voice degree and more emotional follow-through.

Mescal and co-star Josh O’Connor (a man so charming he made tennis look like a religious experience in Challengers) play Lionel and David—two young men swept up in each other’s orbit during WWI-era New England. Their chemistry? Palpable.

Their romance? Poignant. Their sexual tension?

Subtle, until it isn’t. But what The History of Sound offers is more radical than just lust in period costume—it’s the audacity of queer tenderness. Advertisement “I’m a gay man.

I would love to go to the movies and watch a movie about a same-sex relationship that maybe makes me cry, but feels fulfilling,” says Hermanus, with a kind of matter-of-fact clarity that’s like opening a window. “So much of queer cinema—and I’ve made queer cinema like this—is about the struggles.” Yes, the gays want struggle. But we want variety in our struggle.

We want love that doesn’t just end in death, or denial, or coded metaphors involving shirtless men in locker rooms. We want memory, music, and men who make each other feel. What makes Lionel and David’s story sing (besides, you know, the actual singing) is how deftly it balances the ephemeral with the eternal.

The film doesn’t treat queerness as an obstacle course; it’s a lens through which Lionel sees beauty—and then tries to hold onto it before it fades. Hermanus puts it best: “We’re not going to make a movie about the problematizing of their relationship or their sexuality.” Advertisement Instead, we get love as an echo—acoustic and aching. Think wandering New England with a wax cylinder recorder, collecting folk ballads, and the boy you fell in love with along the way.

One such ballad, “Silver Dagger,” might just make you rethink your entire emotional constitution. By the time Lionel whispers, “My grandfather once said that happiness isn’t a story,” you’re left clutching your armrest like it’s the last vestige of your sanity. And then there’s the sheer gay joy of watching Mescal and O’Connor be boys together.

Not just lovers. Not just tragic figures. Boys.

Giddy, open, drunk on music and each other. “I’ve always said this to Josh, but he brings out a childlike version of me,” Mescal says. “I haven’t felt that kind of degree of boyishness in myself for a long time.” Tell me that’s not romance.

I dare you. Advertisement Even the sex in the film resists cliché. It’s there, but delicately framed.

As Hermanus says, “The sex scene is when Lionel is walking around David’s apartment the morning after, and he’s smelling everything and sitting everywhere. He’s absorbing the energy of this person.” You might call it “emotional edging,” but in the most poetic sense possible. RELATED: Paul Mescal’s Thicc Thighs Keep Causing Us to Lose Our Gay Minds Much like the folk songs that inspired it, The History of Sound isn’t loud.

It’s lived in. It trusts you to listen. And if you do, what you’ll hear is more than just a love story—it’s a study in how queer people record their lives in whispers, in melodies, in fleeting glances across crowded bars.

Advertisement And let’s not forget: Mescal sings. Not performatively, not showily, but intimately. “These are beautiful songs,” he says.

“To get to sing them and have them recorded—they’re not songs that I think tons of people will be overly familiar with, so it’s nice to hopefully introduce some people to that kind of world of music.” Queer culture is about finding the sacred in the overlooked. This film? A cathedral of overlooked things.

Yes, there will be those who don’t get it. The film is a slow burn, a soft focus. But as Mescal puts it, “You’re just trying to let time do the work in the film, and let it percolate through Lionel.

For some people, that will be something that interests them. Other people, they might not get it.” But if you do get it—if you recognize yourself in the quiet ache of Lionel’s gaze, or in the humming weight of unspoken love—you’ll leave the theater not just seen, but heard. So listen closely.

This is our history, too. Source: Vanity Fair