A drummer loses most of his hearing overnight: sounds become muffled, the world feels distant. It would unsettle anyone, but for someone whose livelihood depends on sound, it's devastating. Ruben (Riz Ahmed) responds with total denial: he pretends nothing is wrong for as long as he can, convinces himself it's temporary. When he finally admits something is broken, he imagines there must be a fix. There isn't—or at least the surgery he's convinced could be miraculous costs more than he can pay. So he must learn to live with his new reality, which means abandoning the one thing that defined him: music.
Drawn reluctantly into a deaf community, he encounters a fundamentally different approach to life. The community is proud, self-sufficient, finds effective solutions for every challenge without mourning an ability they've lost—or never had. Ruben, by contrast, thinks like someone who has misplaced something vital, unable to grasp that his condition might be permanent. He cannot adapt to this radical change. His relationship with his mentor Joe (Paul Raci) is strained by this unresolved conflict: Joe wants to help him build a new life full of unexpected possibilities, but Ruben clings to the hope of returning to who he was. He cannot summon the pride that surrounds him.
The film is told from a hearing perspective—its audio moves fluidly in and out of the protagonist's subjective experience—yet it treats the deaf community with genuine respect, not least because many of its actors are actually deaf. Paul Raci, who plays Joe and brings a long career as a character actor, knows sign language intimately because his parents are deaf. Riz Ahmed, too, committed himself to learning sign language properly, as well as how to play drums. This dedication, along with his performance as a man drowning in impossible loss, earned him an Oscar nomination in 2021. Sound of Metal took home Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound.