To most of us today, folk music is just another genre. We might have some general knowledge that it originated as rustic traditional songs handed down across generations, but few of us likely think much about it beyond that.

If we did, we might recognize how much human experience, with all its joys and sorrows, was wrapped inside those traditional tunes, and how many private emotions are refracted in them through each link in the human chain that passes them down – and that is what “The History of Sound” (Oliver Hermanus’ new film, starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor) tries to convey. It’s an esoteric idea, to be sure, but the South African director (whose film “Beauty,” won the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2011) has a sophisticated cinematic vocabulary capable of getting it across, and it

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