For much of its duration, the film is a competition. Who's working hardest? Is it Marder and his technicians, immersing us in their protagonist's silence by consciously sabotaging their soundtrack, thereby reminding us of the privilege of full hearing? Or is it Ahmed, obliged to connect all this technical virtuosity to the daily reality Ruben has to live and suffer through? It's possible that internal struggle - one of several set up and set running here - ends in an old-fashioned tie. Those early gig scenes establish what's at stake here, and they're likely to sound brutalising even to dewy-eared teenagers drawn here by the photogenic young leads. Yet Ruben and Lulu's offstage relationship has been pitched at a similar intensity: if not quite the full Kurt-and-Courtney, then high-maintenance nevertheless, what happens when damaged people get together to thrash something out. Witness the scene in which Lulu takes her leave of Ruben for the foreseeable, knowing she has to walk away for the stubborn sticksman to seek the kind of therapeutic assistance he sorely needs; here, Cooke and Ahmed, very much the up-and-comers, go toe-to-toe with anybody else in this year's acting awards stakes. All of which leaves us with Ruben checking into a treatment facility, which could be movie Squaresville or Conventional City, except that this particular treatment facility is one of surely only a handful of facilities specifically tailored to the needs of Deaf addicts, and the sign language hereabouts won't be translated for the benefit of the hearing crowd. Thus Marder, his cast and crew lead us into a world-within-a-world; we have to adjust and adapt, much as Ruben has to his condition.
Holing up here gives Ahmed - and the film - the opportunity to go deeper into this character than any number of afternoon TV movies addressing Deafness as their subject. The worst thing to befall Ruben isn't that it's all gone quiet between his ears; as the centre's manager Joe (a nice promotion for lived-in TV veteran Paul Raci) insists, "We don't regard being Deaf as a handicap." No, it's that this silence forces Ruben to confront the storm that was always raging inside his head, and which the noise of the outside world (not least that generated by Blackgammon in concert) hitherto allowed him to drown out. Spot the quivering fear Ahmed channels when Ruben is ushered into an empty room offering no more than a pen and paper to distract him. How does someone used to living in a state of heightened stimulation - someone who only reluctantly gave up his smartphone upon entering the facility - deal with that emptiness? That's a question the movies haven't really asked in relation to Deafness, and this one has a good answer: that it might just serve as the gateway to some form of tranquility, and raise the possibility of self-acceptance. Marder never rushes that process of realisation. His film runs just under two hours, allowing us to feel our way inside and around Ruben's predicament, and eventually back out into the world. As a director, he's acutely alert to the potential pitfalls of this kind of material. Crucially, we hear no music beyond that Ruben generates for himself; there's never any overt attempt to manipulate viewer response. Given how Ruben got into this situation, maybe it's inevitable that his path through it should be a rocky road. Yet it makes for a far less predictable trajectory than Sound of Metal's logline might suggest, and also leads to an ending that struck these ears, at least, as pretty much perfect.
Sound of Metal is now streaming via Prime Video; it's currently scheduled to open in UK cinemas on May 17.
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