The Sound of Metal

Making its premiere September 6th at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sound of Metal is a visceral and touching exploration of what it is like to experience hearing loss. Drummer Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is forced to confront this disability with his bandmate and girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke). As first-time director Darius Marder puts it, it’s an exploration of “what happens when you strip away who you think you are.”

It is indeed that absence of sound, and the vulnerability that takes that space, that defines this trailer. After a bit of a misleading introduction, with heavy-hitting drums (and Ruben, perhaps in a twist of dramatic irony, saying his partner “sounded great”), only ten seconds in we hear the soundscape submersed, with tinnitus taking its place in a revealing switch of aural perspective.

The sound design, obviously meant to emulate Ruben’s first-hand experience, is the key element in having the audience feel an immediate sense of empathy for his rapidly deteriorating hearing. When he says, “I can’t hear anything,” it’s the sense of panic that we feel even more than the fact of it, which is plain to hear. Scenes of everyday life that are otherwise unremarkable, such as showering, become jarring and disturbing for their lack of sound.

It’s a technique that has been used in films and trailers before—Bird Box and A Quiet Place are the obvious recent candidates that spring to mind. However, the difference here, of course, is that in Sound of Metal, it is disability being explored in an intentionally raw, biographical way, without the veil of sci-fi or fantasy. (Even though the first half bears such traits and markers, this is not quite a horror or thriller trailer.) We are left wondering if this is a true bio-pic, or if actor Riz Ahmed is portraying his own journey.

Notice at 0:54 the aural perspective shifts to Lou, or at least outside Ruben—and we can determine this easily since the audio is “normal.” We see his anger, and we know, having heard from Ruben’s perspective previously, that there is an emotional rift in part created by this discrepancy in sensorial fidelity.

Through a monologue by Ruben’s American Sign Language instructor, and a montage of ASL classroom scenes that shows how Ruben begins to reconnect with his identity as a drummer in a different way—through touch, primarily it seems—he is better able to find a way forward. The trailer ends the same way it did, with drum hits—which the same confidence Ruben bore prior to his hearing loss.

This fictional story is reminiscent of the documentary on deaf classical percussionist Evelyn Glennie. However, the Glennie documentary presents as much more self-assured, as a document of professional practice and a confidently optimistic assessment of how one can work with disability. In Sound of Metal, through sound design and its unique way of shifting narrative perspective on the aural plane, we experience Ruben’s journey towards accepting his disability on a visceral level in this trailer.

— Curtis Perry