Film Review: Sound of Metal
Sound of Metal reverberates with one of the best performances of the year
Playing a thrash drummer grappling with rapid onset hearing loss, Riz Ahmed gives the performance of his career in Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal. With its thoughtful examination of the deaf community and its gripping soundscapes, the film breathes new life into a conventional narrative, delivering a remarkably sensitive cinematic experience. There’s surprising tenderness afoot within Sound of Metal’s emotional tempest, and it makes for one of the best films of the year. Minor spoilers ahead…
What does deafness sound like? How should it be translated through film? With Sound of Metal, filmmaker Darius Marder - the scribe behind 2012’s The Place Beyond the Pines - aims to create a unique cinematic experience that authentically captures the experience of losing one’s hearing. Throughout the film’s press tour, Marder emphasized that “deafness is not silence,” and along with sound designer Nicholas Becker, has crafted a passionate and naturalistic portrait of disability. The gradual hearing loss portrayed in Sound of Metal is varied: sometimes, there are screeching hums that encroach from the periphery; at other times, a muffled underwater tone that overwhelms - it’s a translation that teems with well-researched nuance, and combined with Riz Ahmed’s electric performance, the film deftly leaves behind treacly sentimentality and glib pity to deliver one of the year’s most affecting narratives.
Ahmed plays Ruben, a punk drummer who substitutes a latent heroin addiction with the ferocity of his music. When his hearing suddenly - and without warning - starts to fade, he receives a devastating diagnosis: he’s already lost 75% of his aural faculties, and if he wants to preserve what little hearing he has left, he must give up the passion that gives his life meaning. Making a decision alongside his bandmate and longtime girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke, at her best) to save his sobriety, Ruben enrolls in a support commune for deaf addicts run by a Vietnam veteran named Joe (Paul Raci, a real-life metalhead and ASL advocate).
“…[Sound of Metal] deftly leaves behind treacly sentimentality and condescending pity - which are so very prevalent in these types of stories - to deliver one of the year’s most affecting narratives.”
Tatted up, bleach blonde, and seemingly all muscle and sinew, Ahmed is a far cry from the mousy agility of his roles in Nightcrawler, The Night Of, and Star Wars. This is the performance of a man whose identity stands on the precipice of oblivion, and his turn as Ruben is something special; Sound of Metal finds the delicate tension between rhythm and chaos, fury and calm, and Ahmed is right there at its center. Of course, with Ruben’s shock diagnosis, there’s the melodramatically requisite screams into the void and wanton furniture destruction, but there isn’t a single false note in Ahmed’s performance. With his wide and animated eyes, lanky frame, and evocative deliveries, Ahmed - who learned both the drums and ASL for the role - perfectly expresses the rage of denial as well as the catharsis of surrender.
Much credit also goes to Marder’s adept direction and the script written with his brother, Abraham. Sound of Metal potently weaponizes its sonic peaks and valleys, contrasting its thrash metal opening salvo with a quieter second half at Joe’s support group, where much of its surprising tenderness lies. There are long, quiet stretches of runtime where dialogue is conveyed solely through sign language, and it’s here that Ruben wrestles most with his new disability. In a particularly revealing scene, Joe punctuates: “We’re looking for a solution for this,” pointing at Ruben’s temple, “not this,” tapping his ear. Touching upon, but never diving too deeply into, the clash between those who view deafness as an identity and those who view it as a fixable medical condition, the film all but telegraphs the eventuality of Ruben’s affliction - his deliverance will come not in the form of a miracle or an expensive cochlear implant, but in acceptance.
At its core, Sound of Metal is a film about a volatile man learning to be deaf, and in lesser hands it would easily fall into the glut of mucky, Awards season theatricality. Ahmed’s Ruben, of course, is the type of performance that The Academy loves to overpraise, but under Marder’s direction, it flourishes as raw and intimate - there isn’t an ounce of over-triumphant syrup within this story’s walls. Sound of Metal doesn’t pander with uplifting platitudes or victory-through-hardship tropes, instead, it traces - through soundscapes and bravura performance - an internal journey of bargaining. There are plenty of films out there that traffic in metaphorical death and rebirth, but it’s rare to see, hear and believe it.
