I had neither read nor seen anything related to ‘Sound of Metal’, the new film by Darius Marder, released yesterday on Amazon Prime Video. All I knew was that it starred Riz Ahmed, and that was enough to make me press play. Since binge-watching The Night Of, the 2016 HBO mini-series where Ahmad stars as a first generation immigrant charged with murder in NYC, the actor’s been on my cinephile radar. There’s an earnestness in his performances that makes it hard to look away.
That earnestness is on full display in ‘Sound of Metal’, where Ahmed stars as Ruben, a young heavy metal drummer, and former heroin addict, who suddenly loses his hearing. The film’s logline and trailer reveal the premise of its script, but going into the film completely ignorant of it gave me the gift of a genuine cinematic surprise: Ruben’s gut-punch change of fortune knocked the wind out of me, as well. Within the first twenty minutes of the film, Ruben goes from leading a near-idyllic nomadic life touring the US in an RV as one half of a metal duo together with his girlfriend, Lou—a sublime, bleach-eyebrowed Olivia Cooke— to dealing with permanent hearing loss and a painful separation, which lead him to a deaf community for recovering addicts. If that’s not what the ancient Greek tragedians called peripeteia—a reversal of fortunes—then I don’t know what is.
‘Sound of Metal’ is a film about loss, and coming to terms with it. Ruben resists the tragic twist of fate that’s befallen him. He refuses to accept his deafness as anything other than a temporary setback to be fixed once he has enough money for implants, even as the deaf community he joins introduces him to an entirely different take on his new aural reality. The community’s founder, Joe (Paul Raci), regularly reminds Ruben that deafness isn’t handicap. Housemates enjoy lively meals together, work full time, exchange jokes and grievances, talk about lovers; in short, they lead regular lives. And right when we think Ruben’s found some peace—we see him teaching children from the nearby school for deaf children how to play the drums, and there’s also a slight suggestion of a potential romance between him and schoolteacher Diane (Lauren Ridloff)—he starts itching again, badly craving what he’s lost.
Ruben’s name sign—a special sign used to uniquely identify a person in sign language—shows how the community picks up on his vigilant, fidgety nature. Index finger touching thumb to form a circle, then raised to the eye ‘like an owl’, the sign is also a nod to Riz Ahmed’s signature big-eyed, searching gaze, which conveys Ruben’s fragile restlessness with a subtle, if intense, immediacy. Ahmed also does a phenomenal job of showing his character swinging between disciplined restraint and unbridled rage at his new circumstances. In a scene from his early days at the community, Joe suggests Ruben should try to find stillness by spending time alone, putting pen to paper whenever he feels like fidgeting or moving around. In the blue light of early morning, Ruben grabs a cup of coffee and a donut and heads to Joe’s study, where the room’s bareness and the disorienting lack of sound tip him over the edge: He starts screaming, pounding his fist on the donut, tearing it to pieces and then almost immediately squeezing its crumbling parts back together again.
If you ever wondered what a fit of rage feels and sounds like to someone who is deaf, ‘Sound of Metal’ gives you the tools to imagine, even inhabit, that reality for a brief amount of time. Marder’s direction is sensorial and evocative: intimate close ups of the main characters work together with tight shots in confined spaces to communicate the devastating loneliness that follows such a profound sensorial loss. The film’s few wide shots offer a view of the characters’ surroundings: vast parking lots where Ruben and Lou park the RV, the forest around the deaf community’s house, the streets of Paris. As the film switches between the droning, cavernous soundtrack of Ruben’s perspective of deafness to the naturalism of a full sound-spectrum sound design in a masterful score by composer-sound designer Nicolas Becker, the wide shots further amplify Ruben’s loss. The contrast between lush visuals and a seriously muted soundscape starts off as a signal of nostalgia, even pity; but by the end of the film it becomes the vehicle of Ruben’s new-found empowerment.
‘Sound of Metal’ is so singularly focused on Ruben, and Ruben is so persuasively played by Ahmed, that the film carries the viewer through its two-hour running time with ease. By the end of the film, however, and in the hours after viewing it, one may start to feel that there was something off-kilter; that the film opened up avenues it didn’t end up taking, that it made promises it didn’t keep. This may be the result of scenes left on the cutting room floor, but the final cut should speak for itself. While sharing Ruben’s path from resistance to eventual acceptance makes for powerful cinema, ‘Sound of Metal’ didn’t quite land its main character anywhere, although it seems like it does. Unlike Lou’s storyline, we are never given a sense of where Ruben’s future may lie, other than in Joe’s community, working with kids, and (maybe?) spending more time with Diane. But the film’s final cut slams that door shut, and doesn’t open another. Yes, this may be me wanting to see more of Riz Ahmed. But it’s mostly me wanting to see more of what he could do with where Ruben was finally headed.