Sound of Metal Review: Riz Ahmed's Drummer Facing the Silence

Sound of Metal review: a film that makes you hear loss

Sound of Metal opens in noise. Ruben Stone is the drummer in a two-piece metal act with his girlfriend and singer, Lou, and the pair live in an RV, traveling from one modest venue to the next. The music is punishing, closer to noise rock than to anything polite, and the first scenes make the audience feel how loud it is. Then Ruben's hearing starts to go, and the film begins to take that volume away from the viewer too.

Darius Marder directed the film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 6, 2019, in the Platform Prize program, and Amazon Studios acquired the US distribution rights about a week later. It was first scheduled for a theatrical release on August 14, 2020, was postponed during the COVID-19 pandemic, opened on November 20, 2020 and reached Prime Video on December 4, 2020. It runs 120 minutes.

The review's own hook was a list of terms that sound musical and a plain truth: music is a rhythm of the body as much as of the ear. That idea carries through the film, which treats drumming as breath and heartbeat, something Ruben can lose the sound of without losing the pulse.

Ruben, Lou and the first signs

Riz Ahmed plays Ruben, a drummer and a recovering addict, and Olivia Cooke plays Louise "Lou" Berger. They are a couple and a band. Their mornings, as the review described them, are healthy and tender, with food, coffee and a little dancing before the evening's punishment, and that contrast sets up what Ruben stands to lose.

The symptom arrives as a ping, then as a muffling, then as a night when Ruben cannot hear the room. A doctor tells him that the loss is serious, and that it could not be predicted how long it would last. The review compared the early reaction to the first stage of grief: denial. Ruben insists that he will fix it, he keeps working, and he admits to Lou only what he cannot hide.

The community

With the help of his sponsor, Ruben is taken in by a community for Deaf people who are in recovery. Paul Raci plays Joe, who runs it. According to Wikipedia, Joe is a late-deafened recovering alcoholic who runs a shelter for Deaf people in recovery, and Raci was nominated for an Oscar for the role. The rules are plain: no phone, a quiet room, sign language, and a daily practice of sitting still and writing down what you feel.

The review saw the fit as hard on Ruben and good for him. He learns American Sign Language from children, begins to teach them to drum and gradually earns a place at the dinner table. In one scene the review remembered, he and a boy bang their fists on a metal slide on a playground, and the two communicate through vibration and rhythm without a word. For the first time since his hearing went, Ruben feels like himself.

The decision to leave

The film turns on a choice. Ruben discovers online that Lou is performing without him, and the denial he never really gave up returns. He wants to hear again, and the cochlear implants that might make that possible are expensive. He sells the equipment and the RV to pay for the surgery, a decision made in secret that Joe cannot accept.

After the operation he tells Joe that he wants to leave. Joe's answer, as the review described it, follows Deaf culture: the community does not treat deafness as a hindrance to be fixed, and Ruben's choice to pursue implants runs against what the house stands for. Joe asks him to leave, and the scene is handled quietly, without raised voices.

The implants and the ending

The implants do not give Ruben his old hearing back. Sound arrives distorted and muddy, more like a radio between stations than like music, and the review noted that cochlear implants were never super hearing aids. They approximate what a person might once have heard, with uneven success.

Ruben finds Lou at her father's home in Belgium. Her father is played by Mathieu Amalric. At a party that night the chatter overwhelms the device, Lou and her father perform a song written for her mother, and Ruben, who cannot hear it properly, is moved to tears. The two realize that they saved each other by letting go, and the band is not getting back together. At dawn Ruben leaves, sits outside, and takes the devices off. A church bell is harsh through the implants. In silence, the review wrote, the world finally sounds melodic.

Sound of Metal at a glance: cast, crew and awards

Figures as listed in the Wikipedia article on the film.

How Sound of Metal was made and why it works

The film's greatest trick is sound design. Nicolas Becker, credited as sound engineer and co-composer, shared the Best Sound Oscar with Jaime Baksht, Michelle Couttolenc, Carlos Cortes and Phillip Bladh, and the team also won at the BAFTAs and from the Cinema Audio Society. The review described the effect as hearing the world as Ruben does: the loss of a basic human function that you can still feel in your own ears. The film does not narrate Ruben's deafness. It places the viewer inside it.

The project began as Metalhead, a film that Derek Cianfrance had developed, with the band Jucifer playing themselves. When that version was scrapped, Marder, a friend of Cianfrance, took the idea in a new direction. Dakota Johnson and Matthias Schoenaerts were cast in January 2016, and in July 2018 Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke replaced them, alongside Mathieu Amalric. Shooting took 24 non-consecutive days in 2018, mainly in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with other scenes in Greater Boston and in Antwerp, Belgium, and Marder shot only two takes of each scene on a limited budget.

Lou is easy to underrate. The review spent less time on her than on Ruben, but her story is the other half of the film. She is a singer who has built a life around a partner's need, and the film lets her walk away from that role without making her a villain. When she and Ruben cuddle on the last night and accept that the band is finished, the scene works because both have earned the honesty. Olivia Cooke plays it with very little fuss.

Joe is the moral center of the film, and Paul Raci's performance is the reason the community scenes never feel like a lecture. Joe is strict, but he is not cruel. He gives Ruben a room, a task and a purpose, and when Ruben breaks the unspoken terms of that arrangement, Joe's response is firm and gentle at once. The sequence is among the most affecting in the film, and it is easy to see why it earned Raci an Oscar nomination.

Critics singled out the sound early. Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times praised Becker's sound design, and Empire's Ian Freer praised it as well. Becker also won the Variety Artisans Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The recognition is deserved because the sound is not decoration. It is the film's argument about what a person is when the thing they built their identity on is taken away.

The shooting schedule suited the subject. Twenty-four days and two takes per scene leave little room for polish, and the rawness works in the film's favor. The rhythm of the edit, which won Mikkel E. G. Nielsen the Oscar and the BAFTA, keeps the drumming scenes physical and the quiet scenes uneasy, and it is as responsible for the tension as the sound mix is.

Marder gave Ahmed room to work. He did not want the actor to analyze the script or review dailies, hoping he would trust his instincts, and the result is a performance that feels unguarded from scene to scene.

The preparation was serious. Ahmed spent two hours a day learning American Sign Language and two hours a day on drum lessons over eight months, on top of physical training and work with an acting coach. Many cast members were recruited from the Deaf community, and that decision shows in the scenes at Joe's house, where the signing is natural and the children are not props.

The Oscar run followed. At the 93rd Academy Awards, held on April 25, 2021, Sound of Metal received six nominations: Best Picture for Bert Hamelinck and Sacha Ben Harroche, Best Actor for Riz Ahmed, Best Supporting Actor for Paul Raci, Best Original Screenplay for Darius Marder, Abraham Marder and Derek Cianfrance, and the two it won, Best Film Editing and Best Sound. It also won Best Editing and Best Sound at the BAFTAs, the Directors Guild of America award for first-time feature directing for Marder, and Independent Spirit Awards for Best First Feature, Best Male Lead and Best Supporting Male.

Verdict: is Sound of Metal worth watching?

Yes, and the review's reasoning holds. Sound of Metal is one of the few recent dramas that deserves the label sleeper, a quiet film that is much larger than its budget of $5.4 million suggests. Going in, the writer expected a story about a drummer touring with hearing loss. What he found asked a harder question: who are you when you are no longer what you were meant to be? The film's first minutes, which celebrate drumming, give way to a long period in which the viewer hears as Ruben does. That choice makes the story a shared experience and not an observed one.

Consider how the film is built around perspective. Most scenes are filtered through Ruben's ears, which means the audience's information about the world shrinks as his does. When the music stops being music, the viewer has little else to hold on to except faces, hands and the small signals that people give off when they speak. The review treated that restriction as the film's boldest decision, and it is the reason the plot, which could be summarized in a sentence, feels so full.

It also changes how the quiet scenes land. A film about a loud art form spends much of its running time in near-silence, and the silences are not empty. In the community, the room where Ruben is told to sit with a pen and a pad has a texture of its own. The restlessness of a drummer who cannot stay still, which the review noted with some humor, becomes a physical problem that the film shows with movement and not with speeches.

The film is slow in places and unsparing about addiction. Ruben is a recovering addict, and the community enforces rules that mirror recovery as much as they accommodate deafness. The review noted that being out of the weeds does not mean being out of the woods, and the film agrees. Anyone who wants a redemption arc will not find one here, and anyone who wants a character study of someone grieving a future will.

Riz Ahmed's performance deserves its nomination. Paul Raci, as Joe, deserves his. Olivia Cooke has the thankless task of playing a partner who must let go, and she does it with restraint. The critical consensus bears this out: 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 281 reviews and 82 out of 100 on Metacritic from 36 critics, and a place on 52 critics' top-ten lists for 2020, ranking ninth overall.

A final reading of the ending belongs here, because it is the part of the film people argue about. Ruben does not get his old life back, and he does not get a clean replacement for it. He gets a brief, honest conversation with the person he loved, and a morning in which he chooses silence. The review read that as acceptance and not as defeat. Whether you agree depends on whether you think the film is about hearing or about stillness. The film leaves room for both readings.

Watch it with good headphones or a good sound system, because the sound design is part of the story. Then watch it again with captions off, if you can, to feel what the film is doing with silence. The film is available on Prime Video, and Criterion released it on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on September 27, 2022.

Sources

• Sound of Metal, Wikipedia — Credits, production, release dates, awards and reception