Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound has admirers in Cannes; but I couldn’t help finding it an anaemic, laborious, achingly tasteful film, originally a short story by Ben Shattuck which has become a quasi-Brokeback Mountain film whose tone is one of persistent mournful awe at its own sadness.
Hermanus has made great movies in the past including Beauty and Living but this is a film that is almost petrified by its own upmarket values, paralysed under the varnish of classiness.
