The Sound of Silence

Sound of Metal

2020
Directed by Darius Mulder
★★★★

The history of cinema is the history of elevating image over sound. Alfred Hitchcock once famously quipped, “If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.” Between our growing dependence on subtitles and the increasing genericization of soundtracks, modern filmgoing feels more visual than even Hitchcock could have ever imagined. Our propensity to take sound for granted bleeds into everyday language: we describe going to the theaters to watch or see a movie, never to listen to one. Such a sentiment is perhaps unsurprising given how utterly inaccessible the experience of deafness is to most of us. We can always choose to shut our eyes to the world, but what would it even mean to close our ears?

Enter 2020’s Sound of Metal, a film that, in attempting to answer this question, demands to be heard just as much as it is seen. The film stars the criminally underrated Riz Ahmed as Ruben Stone, a heavy metal drummer whose musical career necessitates a way of life that is just as much, if not more, sonic than visual. The central tragedy of the film takes place early in its first act. Smothered every night in a cacophony of noise – the incessant pounding of his own drums, the ghostly shrieks of his singer bandmate and lover Lou (played by Oliva Cooke), the exhilarating roar of their audience – Ruben wakes up one day to find the familiar thrum of distant traffic noticeably absent. In its place is a muffled, staticky echo that no amount of ear-popping can snap him out of. When he finally arrives at an audiologist’s office to confirm the diagnosis of hearing loss, the irony of his fate is not lost on him. Each moment he spends hammering away on his drums will only chip away at his ability to hear the very music he’s so desperate to return to.

Of course, music is but one of the many casualties of Ruben’s deafness. What makes the film’s treatment of hearing so staggeringly three dimensional is the careful attention that director Darius Mulder and his crew pay to the lesser details of Ruben’s soundscape that another, more ocularcentric film would inevitably subdue: the steady drip-drip of a coffee pot, the grating whir of a blender, that satisfying scratch just before a blues record slips into its soothing lilt. This kind of auditory world-building does more than simply demonstrate craft; it brings the comforting sounds that structure our everyday life up to the surface, so that when we, alongside Ruben, can no longer hear them, we realize the true depth of his loss. And while the film opens with an obligatory heavy metal sequence that allows the sound engineers to flash their mixing and editing chops, it is how that opening scene ends that steals the show. Just before the feedback-wracked score reaches its discordant climax, the camera abruptly cuts to a shot of Ruben and Lou quietly asleep within their RV the next morning. This is a film that understands that silence can be just as jarring – just as present, as heard – as sound.

That cut is just one example of Sound of Metal‘s greatest achievement: its invention of a whole new formal language for thinking about cinematic sound. In particular, Mulder cleverly harmonizes his cinematography and sound editing to create what can best be termed a sonic point of view; throughout the film, close-ups are edited so that we hear any accompanying diegetic sound just like the character would hear them, whereas long shots are edited as if we are hearing what a third person observer of the scene would hear. This constant interplay between subjectivization and objectivization of sound helps ground the film’s portrayal of deafness by never letting the audience forget the gulf between their and Ruben’s experience of the same moment.

Consider the scene when the audiologist examines Ruben’s hearing. The camera opens on a close-up of Ruben’s face in profile as he puts on a pair of headphones and attempts to repeat back a list of words spoken aloud by the doctor into a connected microphone. Even if you can just barely make out the doctor’s soft, distant words, Ruben’s own responses come off as mumbled, incomprehensible echoes, capturing the hopeless feeling of being cut off from your own voice. But the scene takes an infinitely more gut-wrenching turn once the camera cuts to a long shot from the back of the room, allowing us to hear what both characters are saying with fidelity. That Sound of Metal can capture what it feels like to come to terms with deafness through such understated camerawork is a testament to the power of cinema at its best: the ability to turn storytelling into authentic representation.

None of this is to suggest that Sound of Metal is nothing more than an interrogation of our relationship with sound. Although Ruben’s hearing loss is the inciting incident for his narrative arc, it soon becomes clear that what the film really has on its mind is grief, trauma, and the tension between addiction and acceptance. For Ruben is a recovering addict, and a particularly vulnerable one at that; music, along with his relationship with Lou, are how he stayed away from heroin for the last four years, and now his newfound condition threatens to take both of them away from him. In order to stave off a devastating relapse, Ruben makes his way to meet Joe (played by the incredible Paul Raci), an alcoholic who lost his hearing in the Vietnam War and now runs a group home for other deaf recovering addicts. Joe offers Ruben a sanctuary, a community where he can safely process his loss and learn how to live with, rather than in spite of, his disability. But Ruben is a fixer, and the only thing he can think about is cobbling together enough money for a surgical procedure that might just give him a chance to return to his old way of life. The rest of the film tackles the question of whether or not such an insistence on “fixing” his deafness is ultimately just another form of addiction.

Weaving together these disparate threads into a single, coherent story is an ambitious task, and if the film succeeds it does so on the strength of its actors. Ahmed, who learned both drumming and sign language for the role, pours his whole soul out into a performance that oscillates between stoic silence, focused action, and rageful desperation by turns. In a scene where he furiously pounds a donut to a pulp only to then meticulously, almost obsessively attempt to piece it back together, he captures the entire essence of addiction: the illusion of control, the thin line that separates rationalization and relapse, the endless teeter-tottering between extremes that leaves one always moving backwards rather than forward. And in a role that demands more physical acting than dialogue, Ahmed shines most of all in the film’s many, many close-ups, most prominently in the immediate aftermath of his hearing loss. The quiet expression of disbelief on his face – a look somewhere between shock and horror – as he stands in the shower visualizes an emotion that simply can’t be put into either words or any of the five stages of grief. As incredible as Ahmed’s performance is, he is nearly outclassed by Paul Raci, who injects new depth and meaning into the word “quietude.” In one of the literally quietest performances of the year, Raci makes his presence felt every moment he’s on the screen, occupying the moral center of a film that is ultimately about the beauty of stillness.

If the film has a flaw, it’s that its first act might feel a bit underdeveloped, with Ruben’s hearing loss arriving much earlier in the film than I expected and leaving little time to truly plumb the depths of its characters before we dive headfirst into the action. But Sound of Metal knows it is not a film about loss, but rather one about the slow, difficult journey that begins afterwards. After all, as the film goes to great pains to articulate, deafness is itself not a loss – something meant to be resolved or filled up – but rather an awakening to a new way of being in the world. In more ways than one, Sound of Metal feels like a spiritual companion piece to Pixar’s 2020 release Soul, another meditation on presence mediated through the experience of a musician coming to terms with a life-altering physical condition. For me, the similarity was indexed by a specific shot of the breeze in the trees that appears in Sound of Metal at both its halfway point and its ending. In both films, this image is meant to signify a turning point for its protagonists, a moment of revelation that turns into quiet acceptance. But what might end up coming off as kitschy or didactic in a family-friendly movie like Soul feels uncompromisingly in place here. For a film so centered on the question of whether deafness is truly a disability, it is only fitting that Sound of Metal ends by turning the table on its audience, asking those who can hear whether they themselves are deaf to the liberating, blissful sound of absolute silence.