120 min | R | November 20, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A metal drummer starts losing his hearing and watches the only life he knows slip out from under him. The film does not treat deafness as a tragedy to be cured. It treats it as a new world he refuses to enter.
Ruben Stone is a drummer in a two-person metal band and a recovering addict who keeps his sobriety by staying in motion. He lives in an RV with his bandmate and girlfriend Lou, and the noise is the whole point of his life. Then his hearing collapses over a matter of days. Sound of Metal is not a film about going deaf. It is a film about an addict who loses the thing that organizes his sobriety and has to learn that stillness is not the same as defeat.
Riz Ahmed plays Ruben as a man whose body has always been his solution to every problem. When his hearing goes, his first instinct is to throw money and motion at it, and Ahmed shows the panic underneath the bravado. He learns American Sign Language across the film and uses his hands the way an addict reaches for anything. Paul Raci plays Joe, who runs a deaf sober house, and grounds every scene he is in. Raci is a child of deaf adults and a Vietnam veteran, and he plays Joe as a man whose calm was earned and costs him something to maintain. Olivia Cooke plays Lou with a weariness that says she has been holding Ruben together for a long time.
Darius Marder directs from a script he wrote with his brother Abraham Marder, off a story he developed with Derek Cianfrance. The achievement is the sound design, which moves between objective hearing and Ruben’s subjective experience without warning. When the film drops into his point of view, the world goes muffled and underwater, and the audience loses the music along with him. The cochlear implant sequences are harsh and metallic and refuse to present the technology as a happy ending. Marder makes the soundtrack carry the argument the dialogue never states.
This is a film about the difference between fixing a problem and accepting a life. Ruben spends the film treating his deafness as an emergency to be solved, and the people around him keep trying to tell him that the emergency is the problem. The closing scene resolves nothing with technology and everything with surrender. Marder builds the whole film toward a single moment of quiet and earns it.