Sound Of Metal - Movie Review

Critic Score - 7 of 10

General Audience Score - 7 of 10

Losing one's hearing is a simultaneously horrifying and fascinating concept for a film. To take a deep dive into the mind and thought processes of someone losing their hearing is a storyline among the most interesting of the year. But is this film among the best of the year?

PROS - The Sound Of Metal excels in a few key areas of it's filmmaking. The first area is the acting, this movie is well on it's way to garnering at least one if not two acting nominations. The acting work of the main protagonist is really captivating, trying to understand what he's experiencing and him guiding us to where the film is heading is really where it excels. Alongside the acting is the sound work. The sounds are really effective at drawing us into the world of someone going deaf and I found myself captivated many times during some of the sequences of sound work. It will almost assuredly be nominated if not win awards for this.

The overall concept of the film is really great, the characters and story are solid, but there are some issues with these to get to later. There are many aspects of this film that one can enjoy and at times even be completely riveted by. Many of the individual scenes in this film, as well as the ending, just from the acting and sound alone, put them with some of the best of the year.

CONS - I found the overall story process fantastically compelling and was interested in everything the film was doing to bring me into the main characters mind. But I wish the film had done more with it. There is a scene almost immediately after our protagonist starts losing his hearing when he starts smashing things with his fists and breaking stuff. The movie allows us to experience this as normal, we hear it all. I wanted to watch things break and be inside the head of someone going deaf. I wanted to hear nothing or simply some dull thuds as he smashed away. Several times I was wondering why I was hearing the normal sounds instead of silence. Or let us hear as normal and then cut to silence. I feel the film could've made some simple directional choices to assist the audience and really give us more of a complete tour of the deaf experience.

Some of the other issues lay with the screenplay and ideas the story presents. The issue of drugs is a underlying theme of the movie, even though we're told the protagonist is 4 years clean. It presents the deaf community as either coming from or about to go to drugs. I definitely don't want to make light of the traumatic event of losing one's hearing, but the film presents drugs as really the only way deaf people cope and every deaf person is after them. And the community the protagonist goes to stay with is constantly watching to make sure he's not going after drugs. Why? Some of the story and directional choices kept puzzling me and pulling me out of the movie when I was trying so hard to get into it.

SUMMARY - The Sound Of Metal is really good and effective at doing what it does, but in my opinion it could've been even better. And I can't get wholly invested in an otherwise interesting story when aspects of it seem almost ridiculous. But watch this movie if you get a chance, especially for the acting, the ending and the sound the metal makes.