Deaf Cinema Reviews: Sound of Metal

Arthur Hewitt

Warning! This article contains spoilers to the movie ‘Sound of Metal’! If you want to watch it, it’s available on Amazon Prime and in select cinemas.

For most of the population, they will never go through the experience that Riz Ahmed’s character Ruben goes through in the Sound of Metal. However, I have. I have sensorineural bilateral hearing loss, which is just fancy words for when your ears don’t work like they used to before. (Next Ed Sheeran hit anyone? No?)

This film offers a unique and beautifully explored tale of a drummer with a history of addiction who finds himself unexpectedly deaf. It breaks down many stereotypical barriers that the Deaf community has been tackling for years: showing the audience that hearing loss doesn’t just affect old people, or that you can still live a happy, full life whilst deaf, and it even shows that we still enjoy and love music.

Ruben’s raw and, at often times, brutal learning curve in his deaf journey is one all Deaf people have experienced themselves. As he acclimates to a life without sound, he goes through phases of denial, anger and depression, not unlike the seven stages of grief. Ruben’s partner Lou (played by Olivia Cooke) is his girlfriend and lead singer of their band who is the driving force behind getting Ruben help, even sacrificing their relationship by flying to a different country to make sure he gets the help and support he needs. Even though by the end of their movie Ruben realises they’re not compatible anymore, it’s a fresh and bittersweet finale that shows us that not everyone has a fairytale ending and sometimes relationships need to end and chapters need to close before their personal story can progress. They show us that no amount of love can save a relationship that has outgrown each partner, especially now with the language barrier of Ruben who struggles to communicate with his hearing girlfriend who has no signing skills.

Ruben enters a retreat for deaf addicts that is run by Joe (Paul Raci), a Vietnam veteran who relies on ASL (American Sign Language) and lipreading to converse. He has a kind but strict demeanour, making it abundantly clear to Ruben that the point of living here is to be isolated from the hearing world so one can be fully integrated in learning and experiencing Deaf culture. During his stay at the retreat, Ruben picks up ASL and we begin to see the beautifully flourishing Deaf culture that for many years has been closely guarded and not seen by the hearing world. The dinners are loud as people bang on the table and laugh wholeheartedly, with sounds of enthusiastic signing filling the room. Their circles where they talk about their addiction are sombre, with a feeling of connection as each person in the room understands the individual experience of being a deaf addict.

One particular scene which resonated with the audience was when Ruben took a little boy under his wing. As Ruben sat at the bottom of the metal slide, the child at the top, Ruben started tapping out a simple drum beat against the metal. As it reverberated up, the child was fascinated as he could feel it through his hands. He tapped back, and Ruben had managed to teach him the basics of drumming. By the end of the scene, the boy lay dreamily with his head against the metal slide, feeling the vibrations of the drum beat. This breaks down yet another stereotype of deaf people being ‘tone-deaf’ or having no musical skill. Many people have described music as a communication into the soul, something which we all have and enjoy.

We find that during the movie, we witness many people using ASL. When Ruben first appears at the retreat with no knowledge of signing and his only communication being through a laptop, we as the audience are clueless alongside him as no captions are provided for what is going on, and we must use visual cues. However, as Ruben becomes more proficient in ASL, so do we, and we are granted captions to understand the sentences he is understanding at the same time. We even get to watch a sign name created for him which is an important part of someone's Deaf identity. (the sign for ‘owl’ due to his wide, bewildered eyes taking in everything). It makes us feel just how isolating the journey can be as a deaf person with no signing skills, and is a parallel to how many Deaf people feel both in the Deaf community if they don’t know sign, but also as a Deaf person navigating a hearing world.

Ruben’s difficult journey with Deaf culture, tip-toeing between understanding his Deaf identity whilst simultaneously being desperate to ‘fix’ his hearing by selling all of his possessions to afford Cochlear Implant surgery, shows us just how much of a rollercoaster it can be to lose a sense and be plunged into a completely different world. When Ruben asks Joe if he can borrow money to get his van back, which he sold for the surgery, Joe tells him that he sounds like an addict. By the end of the movie, Ruben realises that regardless of having a cochlear implant (though not inherently bad as many Deaf people have and enjoy them), he will never be who he was before. He is deaf. The final shot of the movie shows him finally embracing this as he sits on a bench on a busy street, removes his cochlear implants, and accepts the silence.

The takeaway line from this movie is one of Joe’s few lines that stands out amongst them all; ‘Deafness is not something to fix’.