Silence arrives mid-tour for a heavy-metal drummer in Sound of Metal, Darius Marder's 2020 drama about hearing loss, a history of addiction and the hard work of sitting still. The film runs 120 minutes, stars Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke, and is on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles.
What is Sound of Metal about?
Ruben plays drums in a metal act and lives on the road with his girlfriend Lou. Between shows, the sound around him starts to dull and drop away. A doctor's verdict is blunt: what he has lost will not return, and what remains is going too. For a man whose work and identity are built on noise, the news feels like the end of everything. Lou worries about something more immediate. Ruben is a former addict, and she fears the shock will pull him back. She gets him into a recovery house run for deaf people, a place where nobody treats deafness as a fault to be repaired. There he is taken in exactly as he is and asked to learn a different way of living. The question that follows him is whether he can accept this new normal or will keep reaching for the life he had before.
About the cast
Riz Ahmed leads the cast, with Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci and Lauren Ridloff alongside him. Mathieu Amalric, Tom Kemp, Chris Perfetti and Hillary Baack complete the principal ensemble, and Darius Marder directs. The story stays close to a small circle of people: a musician, the partner who travels with him, and the members of the community that receives him. That narrow focus leaves the performances to carry most of the weight.
Context & significance
Sound of Metal is listed as a Belgian and American co-production and sits in two genres at once, drama and music. The music label is an unusual one here, because the subject is what happens when a musician can no longer rely on his hearing. Stories about addiction usually follow the pull of a substance; this one keeps recovery in the background and asks whether the habits learned in sobriety will hold under a new crisis. Deafness is presented as a way of life with its own community, not only as a medical loss, and much of the drama comes from that difference in outlook. The film has been warmly received and suits viewers who like patient, character-driven dramas.
Watching Sound of Metal on Ktime
Sound of Metal streams on K-Time, a Persian-focused service built for the Iranian diaspora. Reading this page is free; playing the film needs a K-Time account login. You can pick the Persian dub or keep the original audio with Persian subtitles, and the whole interface is available in Farsi.