Life After Loss: Five Years Of Sound Of Metal

As Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2019) draws to an end, we close in on the newly deaf Ruben as he closes his eyes and for the first time, sits with his new world of silence. Then the credits roll out. 

‘Well that was depressing.’ My mum said. 

But I stayed glued to the sofa, transfixed. I had never felt so seen. 

Now five years on from its first release, I first watched Darius Marder’s directorial feature in the ten months I spent recovering from a road accident that my medical notes termed ‘cycle v truck’. I use the term ‘recovering’ loosely. When you sustain a long-term injury, the improvements happen sideways. You go through life grazing your knees, seeing the blood clot until it eventually sheds off and you’re back to running around like it never happened. But permanent injury means although you regain muscle mass and stamina and maybe relearn old functions, you don’t get better. You have to recover your understanding of what life can mean. 

Film doesn’t often know how to treat this. Disability on screen is often a low-hanging fruit played for laughs, a cheap mystery to get a character to seem a little bit more sinister and at a remove, a pornographically oversimplified recovery arc, or it’s the most depressing shit you’ve ever seen. When it’s not pushing the narrative they would be better off dead like in Me Before You, it’s upholding stereotypes that feel like mockery (see Forrest Gump). Films are only ever the sum of their cultural parts, and when the world around disability is uncomfortable, hostile, ignorant and patronizing, the cinematic outcome isn’t surprising. 

Sound of Metal doesn’t settle for such an easy ending. It tells the story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a drummer and former heroin addict in a band with his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke), and his coming to terms with the fact that he’s becoming deaf. It would have been easy for Marder to make the central struggle him wrestling with the medical system to get a hearing aid to ‘fix’ his problem. With cochlear implants vaguely understood in our collective consciousness as a kind of deus-ex machina of medicine, Sound of Metal sets the record straight. Hearing aids are a smart tool that can be useful, but they’re tinny and distorted, making background noises uncomfortably loud. 

The film reckons with this, guiding us through Ruben’s initially dismissive view that an implant is all he needs to be able to carry on living his life as it is. It offers an insight into the creativity that’s required to adjust to existing as disabled in an able-bodied world. It puts forward the idea that doing well might not only mean existing as close as mechanically possible to how you were before. 

Director Darius Marder worked with the community for guidance and cast some deaf actors in peripheral roles. The leader of the group, Joe (Paul Raci), grew up with deaf parents. Where non-hearing roles are so lacking, it was a slap in the face to the deaf community that a hearing actor was cast for the role. But Marder defended the decision, wanting both the audience, and the protagonist, to be thrust into an unfamiliar world. While this excuse is flimsy, and the film does play to the hearing gaze, one of the film’s biggest strengths is its loyalty to presenting the adjustment process. 

It’s filmed like a documentary and follows Ruben closely as he transitions from his musical life to what’s to come after. The film situates us in the loudness of their world with an explosion of sound. We see the couple perform on stage. They’re presented as equals: she sings, he drums. After this, they wake up in the silence of their trailer, where Ruben prepares Lou a smoothie. They work together, eat together and sleep together. Marder presents the interdependence of their connection as helplessly tangled up with noise. 

This perfectly places the audience to understand the poignancy of what’s to come. Ringing turns to muffledness, until he’s sitting in the doctor’s office and can barely hear that he’s being told he’s lost three quarters of his hearing. Astute sound design by Nicolas Becker combines diegetic and omniscient noise, submerging us into the sonic world of Ruben. Becker placed emphasis on the importance of low vibrations and took recordings of Ahmed breathing and swallowing to add in post-production . Combining this with the use of silence makes room for panic to take hold. As Ruben becomes cut off from the auditory world, it almost doesn’t matter what the doctor says, only that what remains of his hearing isn’t coming back. 

Marder wanted to create a language that was coherent with what we see. Close ups on Ruben have the sound subdued like it’s underwater, but wide shots on the set up make foreground the disconnect between his subjective perspective, and that of the hearing world. On set, Ahmed was kitted out with specially designed earbuds that didn’t completely block out sound but created a dissonant white noise, preventing him from hearing his own voice. From this, Ahmed could encompass the distressing disorientation with intelligence. 

Set to carry on with the tour, Lou fears Ruben’s loss of hearing will make him relapse. Ruben’s sponsor gets him to visit a remote sober house for the deaf led by Joe, a deaf former alcoholic. Committing to his program means having no contact with the outside world. Ruben instantly says no, insisting to Lou that he can come along just to watch. The catalyst for him to go is when she wakes up to him smashing up their van, his body lost to rage because his girlfriend is pulling away from him, and he’s a musician who is losing his ability to hear. 

The tension between what makes life worth living for Ruben (drumming and being in a band with his girlfriend) and him losing his hearing, the very thing that makes those things possible, hammers home the depth of loss. Losing bodily function is, at least initially, a grief you carry with you everywhere. It bleeds into how you interact with the world, and how the world now interacts with you. You meet loss over and over again. 

There are good aspects to this isolated community. He can experience acceptance in a space where people know what he’s going through, and there’s a level of fulfilment in him teaching kids how to drum. But that doesn’t make committing to it an easy adjustment or necessarily the right one. For him to still want the hearing aid operation, even after a few choice musical montages of him being helpful and flirting with a girl in a dusk-lit field, feels like the film resisting the easy closing plot that this self-sufficient idyll seems to provide.  

Some deaf viewers criticised this dilemma as cartoonish. It’s simplistic to think that there is such a binary division between the betrayal of giving in to surgery and resigning himself to this cut-off place that realistically, is pretty hard to come by.  But it fleshes out the unsatisfying but real ping-ponging between worlds that comes with adjustment to physical difference. Sound of Metal presents Ruben straddling the two. He grapples with internalised ableism that holds him back from the group and navigates the realisation that he doesn’t quite fit in with his old world anymore either.  

Because of Ruben getting the surgery and having compromised on Joe’s ideology not to view deafness as abnormal, he is kicked out of the safe house. He flies to Paris to surprise Lou at her dad Richard’s (Mathieu Almaric) house. Ruben stays for the party Richard throws that evening, but quickly goes to sit alone, unable to bear the static of the music and piercing noise. He suggests to Lou that they perform again and she shuts it down. They cry together and realise it’s time to move on from each other. 

We feel sad for him. He’s still chasing a life that is already out of his grip. But Marder presents this as a liberation too. The intensity of the couple’s present nods to the co-dependency of their past. Beyond Ruben’s hearing loss, Marder draws out the elements of his life that were already disjointed. For Ruben to even consider the mind-numbing cost of surgery, he had to sell their van (his home), but Lou always had a wealthy father to fall back on. By no means easy, this clean break does give him the chance to find a situation that works for him as he is. Without becoming glib, the film suggests that loss can mean redirection. 

He hasn’t yet come to peace. Before leaving, Joe asked Ruben if he’d had any moments of stillness. Ruben lamented that life would have kept moving past him if he hadn’t gotten the cochlear implant, in a thinly guised allusion to Lou now performing solo and no longer needing him. He hasn’t yet fully confronted his dependence on the outside world– on Lou, on substances, on music. The film suggests that you are not what surrounds you or what you do. Instead, you are how you experience the world. In encouraging us to sit with our own stillness, we are forced to reckon with what really makes us ourselves.

Having been scarred by the glossy worlds of too many Hollywood films, I untensed my shoulders. Sound of Metal gave me exactly what I needed. Because I didn’t need an easy ending. I needed a real one.