This awards contender is a beautifully crafted odyssey
15 cert, 120 min ★★★★★
Dir Darius Marder Starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci, Lauren Ridloff, Mathieu Amalric
Sound of Metal, which deserves every one of its six Oscar nominations, begins with a cacophony and ends in silence. Over two intimate and frightening hours, Riz Ahmed’s character loses his hearing almost totally. At the same time, he starts to attend to internal voices he’d been ignoring.
Darius Marder’s film is just as much the story of an awakening – a man’s learning to listen, and to value a certain kind of stillness – as it is about the surface-level crisis of being suddenly struck deaf. Ruben (Ahmed) starts out as the drummer in a punk-metal duo called Blackgammon, whose lead singer Lou (Olivia Cooke) is also his girlfriend. Both are recovering addicts. The signs of self-harm are notched all the way down one of her forearms, while Ruben’s scruffy highlights and inked body give him the air of a tormented rebel who finds peace in rhythmic obliteration on stage. They spend their lives touring to gigs across America in the vintage RV they call home.
The script leaves it open as to whether Ruben’s prolonged exposure to all this thrashing, amplified noise is the cause of his sudden impairment, or if it could be autoimmunity-related – or indeed a consequence of years of heroin addiction. Perhaps some combination of all three. In any case, the drumming isn’t helping to preserve what little hearing he has left, and doctors tell him it has to stop.
Ahmed is such an angsty powerhouse here. His hands are always chafing, as if deprived of imaginary drumsticks. He seems to fizz with frustration, a bottled-up impatience, and hotly rejects the bad news coming Ruben’s way. He interrupts like someone with a short fuse, as well as badly-eroded coping mechanisms. Emotionally, the distance he travels to get to the film’s perfect final shot is what makes this a great performance.
At a rural retreat for deaf addicts in recovery, Ruben gets taken under the wing of Joe (Paul Raci), the reformed alcoholic and Vietnam vet who runs the place. The film’s portrait of this community, using practically all deaf actors, is rambunctiously credible, stirring a desire in Ruben to be part of some larger network again, even if he’s slow at first to understand.
His status as an outsider, and newcomer to deafness, is one way to justify the controversial risk Ahmed took playing him, despite not being deaf himself.
The 72-year-old Raci, a hearing actor who grew up with deaf parents, has been a jobbing player on US television for years. Nominated alongside Ahmed, he gives quietly sublime detail to his role: it comes down to a series of tête-à-têtes with Ruben that lay down the precepts of deaf culture and inculcate a tough love. When his face sags with disappointment, it’s shattering. Most of Joe’s dialogue is simultaneously spoken and communicated in sign language, which he uses with such punchy emphasis that it unlocks the character even more – he’s an excellent advocate for how rich this language can be.
Sound of Metal was designed to be watched with open captions – compulsory subtitles, in effect – which are a crucial part of the experience, taking us into Ruben’s private world of dulled clatter and throbs. Then, when we hear atmospheric sounds that he cannot, such as the chirruping of insects, or the rustling of trees in the breeze, we pay more attention than we ever normally would.
Ruben’s cochlear implants torment him in something like the same way, making the world he’s trying to puzzle out more foreign, not less. Setting the film’s last stretch in Paris, where he goes to find Lou, only intensifies his bewilderment and accelerates his inward search. It’s a beautifully crafted odyssey, not just into his state of hearing, but his state of mind.
The emotional distance Ahmed travels is what makes his performance great
On Amazon Prime from Monday and in cinemas from May 17