Oliver Hermanus gives quiet, watchful people the time to reveal themselves. We value his patience and care with actors, but The History of Sound exposes the risk: restraint can leave a romance without enough feeling.
Fi1m perspective
In The History of Sound (2025), Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor are most convincing when they have folk songs to record. Hermanus lets their work in isolated backwoods communities occupy their attention, so their subdued performances have something concrete to do. We grew frustrated with the romance because the scenes between the two men offered so little variation. The songs kept us interested when the relationship did not. It is a useful introduction to a director whose patience with actors we value, though we sometimes wish he would ask more of them.
His feature debut was Shirley Adams (2009), but the concerns of Beauty (2011) and Moffie (2019) make the connection to that cautious romance clearer. Beauty centres on closeted middle-aged masculinity; Moffie examines homophobia and conscription in apartheid-era South Africa. Across these films, shame and the pressure to behave as others expect recur. Hermanus favours long, observational shots, allowing us time to study people who have reasons to conceal themselves.
Living (2022) was his first non-South African feature, a British-set adaptation of Ikiru scripted by Kazuo Ishiguro. Bill Nighy’s restrained performance fits Hermanus’s interest in actors who keep feelings largely unspoken. His work with cinematographer Jamie Ramsay, a collaborator on four films, is marked by carefully composed, atmospheric images. There is care in how Hermanus frames people as well as how he directs them, but we do not find such control a sufficient pleasure on its own.
That is the difficulty with The History of Sound. Ben Shattuck’s screenplay gives Lionel Worthing and David White worthwhile work to share, but the lovers need a stronger sense of discovery between them. Hadley Robinson’s Belle Sinclair offers a welcome corrective: her precision shows how much an actor can communicate without becoming demonstrative. Hermanus need not abandon quiet performances; he needs to distinguish more clearly between one quiet scene and the next. Approach this one for the folk songs and the performances, with modest expectations of the love story.
Biography
Oliver Hermanus is a South African film director and writer. He was born in Cape Town and studied film, media and visual studies at the University of Cape Town before completing a master's degree at the London Film School.
His feature films include Shirley Adams (2009), Beauty (2011), which won the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, The Endless River (2015), Moffie (2019), Living (2022) and The History of Sound (2025). He also directed episodes of the 2024 miniseries Mary & George.
