A listening guide to A Quiet Place and Sound of Metal.
A film goes quiet. Has the world stopped making noise, or have we stopped being allowed to hear it?
That distinction is a useful way into A Quiet Place and Sound of Metal. Quiet can make a footstep dangerous, place us inside a character’s auditory perspective, or prevent us from understanding a conversation. Those are different jobs, even when the volume control barely seems to move.
The guide below draws on the films’ sound teams’ interviews and published scene descriptions. Its aim is practical: give you three questions to carry into a rewatch, without mistaking a carefully constructed soundtrack for a universal account of deafness.
Spoiler note: This discusses the waterfall and Regan’s sound perspective in A Quiet Place, and communal scenes and Ruben’s cochlear-implant experience in Sound of Metal. It does not unpack either ending.
Keep three questions beside the volume button
- What can we hear? Name what remains: environmental noise, a voice, music, muffled activity, or no audible soundtrack. “Quiet” is the beginning of the description, not the whole answer.
- Whose perspective is shaping it? Are we being given the surrounding space, or a particular character’s access to that space? A close-up can be a clue, but look for a change in the sound as well.
- What information is withheld, and from whom? Is a sound missing, a voice unintelligible, or a conversation untranslated? Distinguish what you cannot understand from what the people onscreen cannot understand.
You do not need technical vocabulary to use this map. The important move is to separate the environment, the character and the viewer. They need not have the same information.
A Quiet Place: noise can offer cover
The premise puts sound under suspicion: a family must avoid creatures that hunt by hearing. But that does not mean every scene obeys a simple rule of “less noise equals more safety.”
In Slate’s interview with supervising sound editors Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, Van der Ryn explains the waterfall scene: father and son can talk and even yell because the waterfall masks their voices. The surrounding noise makes speech possible.
Run that through the map. What can we hear? Voices in a louder environment. Whose perspective? The useful distinction here is the shared setting, rather than a representation of one person’s hearing loss. What is withheld? Within the film’s sound-hunting logic, the voices are masked from the threat, not removed from our understanding.
That gives you a sharper question than “How quiet is this scene?” Ask whether a sound stands out from its surroundings. A whisper and a yell cannot be judged independently of the space around them.
This is also why sparse sound is not the same as an empty soundtrack. Van der Ryn told The Verge that establishing ordinary environmental details, including wind through empty streets, was central to drawing audiences into the world. The work is in choosing what remains, not simply turning everything down.
Regan changes the question from where to who
A Quiet Place itself breaks any neat division between “a film about a quiet world” and “a film about subjective hearing.” Regan, played by Millicent Simmonds, is the reason to keep those categories flexible.
In the Slate interview, Aadahl describes a muted, low internal rumble for Regan’s implant-on perspective. He says Simmonds’ account of her experience, relayed through John Krasinski, helped shape that choice. Van der Ryn then distinguishes those subtle sounds from the complete digital silence used when her implant is switched off. The Verge interview also identifies these passages as literally having no sound.
Here the answer to the second question matters most. The soundtrack is presenting Regan’s perspective; it is not announcing that the surrounding world has ceased to make noise. Losing the environmental track means losing one route to information about that world.
On a rewatch, keep the image in the equation. What does it still tell you when the soundtrack withdraws? That is a more useful exercise than treating silence alone as proof that a scene must mean fear, peace or isolation.
Sound of Metal: the room and Ruben do not share a soundtrack
Sound of Metal follows Ruben, the drummer played by Riz Ahmed, as he loses his hearing. Its sound design offers another way to separate the activity of a space from a character’s access to it.
Vulture’s interview with sound designer Nicolas Becker describes a communal dinner whose audio alternates between Ruben’s internal perspective and the clanking, eating and laughter around him. The meal is not becoming silent every time the soundtrack changes. Our access to it is changing.
Use the same questions again. What can we hear? Different presentations of one gathering. Whose perspective? Ruben’s subjective track, contrasted with the audible activity around him. What is withheld? Some of that surrounding activity is no longer available to the listener in the same form. The contrast need not mean that the other people have stopped communicating.
Becker’s methods make that distinction especially concrete. Both Vulture and CNN’s interviews with Becker and editor Mikkel Nielsen describe recordings made from Ahmed’s body, including the use of microphones on or inside it. This was not simply a conventional room recording with its volume lowered. Bodily sound became material for constructing Ruben’s perspective.
That does not make every sound a literal transcript of his physiology. It makes the choice of what we are allowed to hear part of the storytelling.
A conversation can be present and still inaccessible
The third question reaches beyond the audio mix. CNN reports that before Ruben learns American Sign Language, the film leaves ASL uncaptioned. Nielsen describes the editing principle as keeping the audience from knowing more than the main character.
That principle has a limit worth noticing: a viewer who knows ASL can understand what an ASL-unfamiliar viewer cannot. The signing has not become meaningless because Ruben cannot yet follow it. Information is present, but access to it differs.
On a rewatch, do not write “nothing is being said” when the more accurate note is “I cannot understand this exchange.” That small correction keeps a character’s unfamiliarity from becoming a judgment about everyone else in the room.
The same caution applies to the later implant scenes. CNN describes Ruben struggling with overlapping conversations and disorienting sound at a Parisian garden party. Our reading is that this complicates a volume-based account of access: making more sound available is not the same thing as making a social situation easy to follow.
A soundtrack is not a universal Deaf experience
The listening map is a way to read filmmaking, not a claim that hearing viewers can learn what all deaf people experience by listening to a simulation.
CNN includes a pointed criticism from Deaf writer Sara Nović: repeated captions such as “distorted sound” do not convey the specific gaps in Ruben’s understanding or give Deaf viewers the same emotional information as the audio. A film can carefully restrict a hearing viewer’s access and still leave its caption users with too little detail.
Deaf critic Liam O’Dell’s review likewise resists a simple endorsement. He praises the film’s rejection of implants as a magical restoration of hearing, while questioning its casting choices and Joe’s role as a wise mentor. Craft achievement and representational limits can coexist.
Keep the claim modest: these are designed perspectives for particular fictional characters. Neither Regan’s digital silence nor Ruben’s distortion should become your definition of deafness, Deaf culture or what an implant will sound like for someone else.
Try one scene twice
Choose the waterfall sequence or the communal dinner, rather than attempting to analyse an entire film at once. Keep your usual captions and accessibility tools on; this is not a deprivation test.
- First pass: name what remains. Write one short line beginning “I can hear…” If you are following captions rather than audio, record the sound information the captions actually provide. Do not fill in details they leave out.
- Second pass: mark the access. Write “The setting / character / viewer has…” and note one difference between them. If the perspective does not change, that is a useful finding too.
- Finish with the missing information. Is something masked from the threat, altered for our access to a character, or untranslated for some viewers? If the scene does not settle the question, leave it open.
For audio listening at home, Aadahl and Van der Ryn recommend reducing competing household noise, with headphones as an option. Use a comfortable volume; the exercise is about contrasts, not loudness.
The next time a film goes quiet, resist reaching for “silence” as the finished explanation. Ask what remains, whose access you are sharing, and what you are no longer being told.