Singer-songwriter Sia stepped behind the camera for Music, a 2021 musical drama about two half-sisters thrown together by a grandmother's death. Maddie Ziegler, Kate Hudson and Leslie Odom Jr. lead the cast in a story that moves between everyday struggle and full-scale musical numbers.
What is Music about?
Zu has spent years keeping her distance from her family, living on her own terms and answering to nobody. That changes overnight when she becomes the only person left to look after Music, her teenage half-sister, who is on the autism spectrum. Their grandmother had arranged every detail of Music's days into a careful, comforting routine, and with her gone, Zu inherits a world she does not understand and has never had the patience to learn. The early stretch is a collision of two temperaments: one sister improvising her way through life, the other depending on order to feel safe. As the weeks pass, the question quietly flips. It stops being about whether Zu can manage Music and starts asking which of the two actually sees the world more clearly. Musical sequences break out from the drama, rendering Music's inner experience as colour, choreography and song, while a neighbour and a small circle of others are drawn into the sisters' new life.
About the cast
Maddie Ziegler, Kate Hudson and Leslie Odom Jr. front the film, with Beto Calvillo, Mary Kay Place, Braeden Marcott, Juliette Lewis and Brandon Soo Hoo in supporting parts. The musical passages ask the performers to shift between naturalistic scenes and stylised dance staging, and the ensemble is built around that double demand. Sia, known first as a recording artist, is credited as director.
Context & significance
Music is a United States production released in 2021 and runs a substantial one hundred and sixty-eight minutes, long for a musical drama and a sign of how much room it gives both the family story and the song sequences. It sits within the tradition of films that use musical numbers to externalise what a character cannot say out loud, here applied to a young woman whose way of communicating differs from those around her.
Watching Music on Ktime
Music is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can choose between hearing the songs in the original and following along in Farsi. Reading this page is free; to stream the film, sign in with a K-Time account, where the interface is built in Farsi for Iranians living abroad.