• "Sound of Metal" offers a demanding role to Riz Ahmed, astonishing as a hard-rock drummer who becomes deaf.

  • This first film by Darius Marder shares the experience of this young man isolated by a handicap which prevents him from practicing his profession.

  • French sound engineer Nicolas Becker and his team received an Oscar for their impressive work.

It's the story of the drummer of a hard-rock duo who suddenly goes deaf.

Sound of Metal

, Darius Marder's first film presented at the Deauville Festival, allows us to understand the nightmare experienced by this musician played by Riz Ahmed.

Will he choose to live with this deafness which distances him from his companion and partner played by Olivia Cooke?

Or choose to wear a device?

These are the stakes of a fascinating film in which Mathieu Amalric makes an appearance as concerned dad.

An Oscar for sound

The director, known for writing the screenplay for

Derek Cianfrance's

A Place Beyond The Pines

, was inspired by his grandmother who suddenly lost her hearing after taking medication.

She found herself "trapped in a 

no man's land

between the deaf world and the hearing world", he explains in the press kit.

It is this traumatic experience that transcribes the French sound engineer Nicolas Becker and his team who received an Oscar for their fabulous work.

“Nicolas Becker is a mad scientist.

All of his ideas for developing this soundscape are incredibly complex, but the rendering is so elegant that it seems almost simple, intuitive, while there are countless numbers of audio tracks that overlap in the sound mix of this film ” , explains Riz Ahmed.

The actor did not hesitate to put himself in total immersion to understand what his character feels.

The experience of deafness

Not content with learning to play the drums, the actor learned about the American version of sign language. He also wore implants that produced a loud "white noise" which helped him simulate hearing loss to try and better understand what his character is feeling. Thanks to this process, Riz Ahmed could no longer even hear the sound of his own voice. “Of course, I would never know what it is to be completely deaf, but the implants helped create some of the side effects of deafness, and it was intense,” he says.

This is what the viewer also feels during this fascinating film where sound and image respond and intermingle.

The result is startling.

The isolation of the disabled hero to practice his passion and his temptation to plunge back into past addictions are portrayed with great sensitivity by Darius Marder.

Sound of Metal

is a total success.

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  • Cinema

  • Deauville American Film Festival

  • Oscars

  • Rock