A review of the new film “Sound Of Metal”
Ruben (British Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed) is a drummer and Lou (Olivia Cooke) is the guitarist and singer in a punk-metal duo called Blackgammon. Both are recovering addicts in a loving but complicated co-dependent relationship. They seem to be on the cusp of some professional success when Ruben suffers a sudden and catastrophic loss of hearing.
What can he do? He wants to go for cochlear implants but they are incredibly expensive and not always successful. An alternative – espoused by Joe (Paul Raci) who runs a small rural deaf community – is that Ruben should learn to live with his deafness: “the belief that being deaf is not a handicap. Not something to fix.”
I haven’t seen a film which puts deafness front and centre since the 1986 movie “Children Of A Lesser God”, but “Sound Of Metal” actually places the viewer in Ruben’s world with brilliant sound design by Nicolas Becker (and, in the cinema where I saw the film, there are closed captions to further give us the perspective of the deaf community).
It is a remarkable directorial début by Darius Marder who co-devised the story with Derek Cianfrance and co-wrote the script with his brother Abraham Marder and, in part, he was inspired by the experience of his grandmother who dramatically lost her hearing.
A large number of the cast were hired from the deaf community and, although Raci is not deaf, he is a native ASL (American Sign Language) user. Of course, the beating heart of this film is the wonderful performance by Ahmed who has come a long way since the “Star Wars” spin-off “Rogue One”. For this role, he learned to play the drums and to use ASL.
“Sound Of Metal” is often a disturbing film to watch, partly because of the distorted and discordant sound, partly because of the pain and anger in Ahmed’s performance, and party because of the hard message that disability should be embraced. But it is definitely a must-see work.