Sound of Metal

Riz Ahmed is rightly being praised for his performance in this study of a man stripped of a sensation that’s central to his art—and is central to all of us. Ahmed plays Ruben, a heavy metal drummer in a band with his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cook). During the tour he realises that his hearing is deteriorating—and fast.

It isn’t just his performance that’s remarkable about this film, but the way it becomes so much about what you hear. The sound design moves from a ‘third person’ account of what’s heard to hearing what Ruben hears: what he hears when he’s tearing up the drums in concert; what he hears outside the venue and what he hears when he goes to seek initial advice in a pharmacy. The damage to his hearing—which may be because of previous drug abuse or it may not—will cost a lot to try and remedy.

Ruben is accepted into a church-run retreat run by Veteran Joe (Paul Raci), and the environment is completely different for Ruben. He doesn’t know American Sign Language and if the audience doesn’t know it either then sometimes the dialogue is not known to us. As he learns it though, through spending time with other adults and later going into schools and so on, we get subtitles on his sign language interaction.

This isn’t a standard movie about someone with an issue, and how endearing they are. It’s not Rain Man. That type of film is very much of its time, and people who have impairments are spoken of and spoken to very differently now. This is a story about how one man deals with his issues, and there will be a lot of analysis about symbolism as the film takes time to be inside the senses of this man. As his situation changes we get to experience it with him, and every sound is heightened.

Riz Ahmed is great, and I loved Manchester-born Olivia Cook too—these are two Brits in an American movie and that’s to be celebrated, especially with awards season upon us. It’s such a good performance from Ahmed: covered in tattoos and bewildered at a situation which he naturally wants to fight back at, he’s like anyone who’s in some way taken down by the prospect of failure and has to take a route back to some sort of normality.