Something to watch tonight: Thursday 1 February

Sound of Metal (Marder, 2019)

Going back through pre­vi­ous RNZ pieces, I was pleased to alight upon this January 2021 review of the bril­liant and thrill­ing drama Sound of Metal.

Nominated for six Oscars and win­ning two (in the Covid-delayed 2021 cere­mony where Nomadland won Best Picture), the film is about the drum­mer in a hard­scrabble punk two-piece band who finds him­self going deaf and strug­gling to find a pur­pose to life as a result.

The bril­liant Riz Ahmed is the lead but the whole ensemble is superb, not least Paul Raci as Joe, the guy who runs the shel­ter for deaf recov­er­ing addicts where Ahmed’s char­ac­ter Ruben finds a home.

Often these days, you will find push­back from mar­gin­al­ised com­munit­ies over cast­ing abled, cis or incor­rect eth­ni­cit­ies in movies but the deaf com­munity – at least as far as I have read – is totally behind Ahmed and Sound of Metal. Partly because the film does such a good job of por­tray­ing their con­di­tion and then cast so many from the deaf com­munity in oth­er roles, but also because Ahmed him­self is so utterly convincing.

Sound of Metal isn’t just a leap for­ward in the present­a­tion of dis­ab­il­ity on screen, it’s also a heart-breaking human story of how to find your­self when you think you are los­ing everything. The final shot is just so per­fect that I could barely believe it. Written and dir­ec­ted by Darius Marder, Sound of Metal is a bril­liant achieve­ment and eas­ily one of the best films of 2020.

Where to watch Sound of Metal

Aotearoa: Streaming on Prime Video, also a digit­al rent­al at AroVision.

Australia: Streaming on Prime Video and on SBS On Demand (with ads)

USA: Streaming on Prime Video and on Freevee (with ads)

UK: Streaming on Prime Video and on BBC iPlayer (free with TV licence)

Further reading

Subscriber Tui left an excel­lent com­ment about yesterday’s Forgotten Silver post:

Thinking about it more, it’s even more plaus­ible – we now know about many early film­makers who were com­pletely erased from film his­tory until recently because they were women and/or people of col­our and/or work­ing in obscure coun­tries like, oh, New Zealand. If an innov­at­or like Alice Guy Blaché can have been “for­got­ten” for so many years, why not a Colin McKenzie?

Also, I pos­ted a fresh review of a good new film that dropped on Netflix the week before last. The Kitchen is co-written and co-directed by Daniel Kaluuya (star of Get Out, Black Panther and Queen & Slim) and – des­pite being yet anoth­er dysto­pi­an fic­tion – is well worth your time.