Riz Ahmed gives a career-best performance in an astonishing drama that’s rooted in reality and fully captioned for allIn the 2020 drama Mogul Mowgli, co-writer and star Riz Ahmed played a British-Pakistani rapper struck down by a debilitating illness on the eve of his international breakthrough.
In Sound of Metal, which premiered in Toronto in 2019, Ahmed plays an American drummer whose life is turned upside down by the onset of deafness.
Stylistically these two films could not be more different; Sound of Metal is acutely realist with a docudrama edge, while Mogul Mowgli has been described as a “Sufi horror musical melodrama hybrid”.
Yet both films are concerned with identity, a thorny issue with which Ahmed wrestled in the eye-opening 2020 short The Long Goodbye, and which runs through his finest work, including this remarkable Oscar contender.Ahmed is Ruben Stone, drumming with singer-guitarist Lou (Olivia Cooke) in the noise-merchant two-piece Blackgammon.
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