When something integral is taken away, you must adapt and relearn everything you knew about yourself and around you.
Our worldly existence and perception are balanced so perilously upon the delicate equilibrium of our senses that if a single one is knocked out of place, the entire system is left in ruin. It’d take a very long time to adjust to life without one of our senses, and the whole convalescence is a rude awakening of just how fragile our perception really is. The vast breadth of existence and life can barely funnel through the tight gap of our five senses and into our consciousness as it is, take one out of the equation and you’ll be cutting out one fifth of the whole world relative to you. But who needs it anyway? All of that noise and nonsense has little value at the end of the day, and upon cutting that sensory weight adrift, one can truly feel the serene silence within them.
I’ve never been able to fully decide which sense I’d get rid of if I was forced to, my hearing or my sight. It’s a complicated conundrum because without my hearing I have no music, without my sight I can’t read or write and I live in darkness, either scenario is equally terrifying and I get the shorter end of the stick. Sound of Metal (2020) realised one of those fears in brilliantly immersive detail and I’m so disappointed that I didn’t get to watch this film in cinemas where it truly belongs. You’ve all probably heard paeans about its sound design and editing, but none ever do it complete justice and it is something that needs to be experienced to truly grasp. Visually amazing too, being shot with beautiful 35mm film, but this movie was made for its sound and it ultimately takes centre stage here. When heavy metal drummer, Ruben begins to lose his hearing, during what seems to be the peak of his career, he’s confronted with the agonising truth of just how much of his entire life was dependent upon that one sense. His journey of coming to grips with his deafness, as he learns to be deaf, is one of loss, confusion and acceptance, and when he tries to fight it, it ends up in disappointment until he realises that silence is now his best friend. I never usually like watching films in more than one sitting, I just don’t see the point of disrupting the flow of the narrative by stopping it half way through and then resuming it the next day, but if I have to, I will. In this case I had to, because I had my vaccine which took longer than usual and I had to go to work right after that…. Why am I telling you this? The point I’m failing to make here is that despite my stopping the film halfway to resume it a few days later, I was so gripped it the entire way through that its emotive effect was not lost or diminished by that disruption.
I was sucked right into the sound bubble of the film with a towering wall of screeching guitar feedback and thundering drums as Ruben and his girlfriend play something that I can only describe as avant-garde metal. Forgive me, I don’t listen to metal music much because it sets my teeth on edge but whatever I heard here didn’t hence why I’m calling it that, so put your kitchen knives down. Even when his hearing is seemingly fine, you still here faint portentous high-pitched whistling tones and the occasional microsecond of muffling hiding behind the sounds of the world. My hearing and Ruben’s became intertwined as it took me down with his hearing, the sound engineering suddenly shifting into a muffled grasp thumps and scratches the very first panic inducing moment Ruben realises that something is terribly wrong. From that point onwards up until complete deafness the sound is in gradual freefall. It’s not as if we only hear the sounds through Ruben’s ears because the whole film would be too aurally unfriendly for some audiences, his deteriorating hearing is often juxtaposed against the normal sounds of the world which everyone else is capable of hearing to show just how bad things are getting for him. Once he gets his implant, the whole sound scape turns into a discordant cacophonous wall of distorted metallic scratches and dialogue that come crashing down on Ruben and the audience with horrible disappointment that this is all his hearing will ever be from now one. This segment of the film makes me realise why the film is called what it is, apart from Ruben being a metal drummer too. After two hours of the gears of confusion and despair grinding against each other, Ruben surrenders in a bitter-sweet ending that leaves his future in hopeful uncertainty, and he enjoys the stillness he so desperately needs.
Visually the film augments Ruben’s hearing, the grainy film can be seen to reflect his sound disturbances, especially in low-light scenes where Ruben’s paroxysms come bursting out. The cinematography changes its tempo once he’s admitted into the deaf community, with the colour palette shifting to washed our greys and whites, dropping down a shade even more when his implants are a bust, but then finally flourishing in tones in the final beautiful scene. Along with that the camera picks its moments of movement and stasis, becoming more erratic and tremulous, tied to Ruben’s panic, and then calming down like a thrashing beast who runs out of energy as he learns to be deaf and assimilates into the community. Intensely claustrophobic close ups bore us into his heavy eyes when the shockingly terrible results of the implant are revealed, then that claustrophobia turns into a feeling of weightlessness once he takes the device off his ears and submerges himself and us into the silence.
I’m going to declare that this is my favourite performance from Riz Ahmed. His nuanced characterisation of Ruben covers the spectrum of goofy, eccentric and focused when his hearing is fine, to flummoxed, discomposed, angry, despairing, disappointed, lost and peaceful throughout the rest of it. Same can be said for Paul Raci’s performance of Joe, the honourable head conductor of the deaf community, who’s confidence and calmness are a rock to Ruben, guiding his way through the labyrinthine silence and coming to terms with it.
I just realised that they’re showing this film in cinemas once they open up, you’ll find me there. This is one of the most immersive films I’ve seen in a while, and not in the formulaic uninventive manner that films of the classical Hollywood era shovelled out day after day, no, this particular immersion comes from a place of thoughtful representation, of bringing the fear of silence and its ultimately peaceful beauty to life and to show that in spite of the initial struggle, no one is lost without their senses.
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