Movie Review : Sound of Metal (2020)

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There are two school of thought in life: one that dictates you can sacrifice anything for what you want the most and another dictating that you should accept the hand life deals you and navigate existence accordingly. I’m not sure where exactly Darius Marder’s movie Sound of Metal stands on that dichotomy, but it’s what makes it interesting. It’s a film about having to choose who you are when life forces that choice on you. It’s both very simple and very complicated.

Sound of Metal tells the story of Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed), a heavy metal drummer who starts going deaf who no apparent reason. Living in a precarious, day-to-day manner with his bandmate and girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke), he’s forced to put his professional plans on hold and choose between accepting his new reality and getting cochlear implant surgery, so that he can hear again. Whatever he decides, the life he’s known prior is forever gone.

In other words, Ruben has a gigantic shit sandwich to eat.

Sound, loss and identity

This is a very stern movie. It is so concerned with raw realism and minimalism that it doesn’t offer much emotional context for you to decide what to feel about Ruben. It both works for and against it. It works for Sound of Metal because loss and identity are two very common themes in drama and the film’s bare aesthetic is a nice break from conventional tropes. It also works against it because the film doesn’t ever seem to make up its mind about its own premise.

At first, it seems like Sound of Metal is arguing for Ruben to accept his new identity. He joins a deaf community, learns to communicate again and seems to find a sense of purpose. But Ruben’s identity seems intricately linked to his relationship to Lou, who seems to be living a new life of her own in France with her estranged father. In his mind, being a drummer is a lot fucking cooler than being deaf. He never really considers the idea that he must suffer fate.

That made Ruben somehow extremely sympathetic to me. Sound of Metal explains very little about him outside the fact that he once was a heroin addict, but the fact that he clearly isn’t the best counsel for himself and yet decides to live on his own terms is very endearing to me. Ruben is a man who is ready to suffer for the few things he decided were sacred for him. Namely his relationship to Lou. It’s all he does for her. He sacrifices and suffers for two hours.

Sound of fate

Common sense wants that Ruben should accept the devastating blow he’s suffered. His singlemindedness about continuing the band is portrayed to be self-defeating. But I found it interesting. Sound of Metal is very much not a movie about heavy metal. Even less so about music. Ruben never seems in withdrawal of drumming. The act of smashing drums with wooden sticks seems to have only cathartic value to him.

By fighting how own deafness away, Ruben is clinging to his own identity as a musician which he perceives to have saved his life from heroin addiction. Sound of Metal never takes a clear stance about it, but it seems like a positive value to me. Ruben is a man who salvages his life from the wasteland of drug addiction through love and music. Now that he’s clear-eyed and without anything tangible ahead of him, who says he cannot do it again, huh?

The marines have an expression to address adversity: improvise, adapt, overcome. Ruben’s doggedness about pursuing an identity he felt comfortable with reminded me of that. I was frustrated that Darius Marder and Sound of Metal didn’t side with him on that and left the ending of the movie open to interpretation, but there are plenty of deaf people who managed to make music. If Beethoven did it, why wouldn’t Ruben use modern medicine to do it too?

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I really liked Sound of Metal. It wasn’t all that I wanted it to be, but its bare aesthetic and its noncommittal stance really goaded me into rooting for its protagonist. I have a soft spot for rugged motherfuckers who flat out refuse to be victims of fate. It’s about sound, loss and identity, but it’s also about loneliness, limitation, frustration, not letting people decide who you are for you and plenty of other things. Not the easiest two hours, but a very involving, rewarding one.

8.1/10