The Sound of Unheard Love: On Sorda

The Spanish film Sorda (Silent Love) employs an extraordinarily distinctive sound design and presents nearly flawless performances by its two leads to immerse the audience in the world of those who cannot hear, allowing us to truly feel their joys, sorrows, frustrations, and resilience—while never shying away from the difficulties and helplessness they face amid life’s changes.

The protagonist, Ángela, is a middle-aged woman who has been deaf since childhood. Yet from the viewer’s perspective, her daily life seems no different from ours: she enjoys a healthy and positive relationship with her partner Héctor, works harmoniously with colleagues in a pottery studio in rural Murcia, and her life is filled with a sense of stability. One day, Ángela becomes pregnant. During prenatal checkups, both she and Héctor, along with Ángela’s considerate parents, cannot help but worry whether the unborn child might also inherit hearing problems. As Ángela prepares to embrace the new role of motherhood, she grows increasingly anxious: in a family where hearing things is not an issue, what kind of place will she have?

A large portion of the film is devoted to Ángela’s arduous labor. At first, Héctor is by her side, interpreting with sign language and constantly urging her to “push, just a little harder.” But when the doctors sense danger, they ask Héctor to step aside and focus solely on delivering the baby. On the hospital bed, unable to voice her bodily sensations, Ángela is plunged into despair. Fortunately, the medical team proves to be highly professional and respectful towards their deaf patient: even when the panicked and furious mother tears a mask off one of them, they remain patient and carry out each step carefully, ensuring the safety of both mother and child.

A month later, a follow-up checkup confirms that the newborn daughter is in perfect health. But gradually, the couple’s relationship and family dynamics come under strain as differences in parenting styles emerge. As a deaf mother, Ángela must carve out a new sense of belonging in a society built for those who have no trouble hearing. She insists on putting headphones on her crawling infant, introduces her daughter to words through sign language, and urges Héctor to do the same whenever possible. After all, she fears that her child might someday be unable to communicate with her. At gatherings with her deaf friends, someone even remarks that these children, once they reach adolescence, may start to look down on their deaf parents—even if they are fluent in sign language. When hearing relatives visit their home, chatting casually with Héctor or amusing the little girl, the presence of spoken language fills the space so much more than the silence of sign language, leaving Ángela with a growing sense of isolation.

This inevitably calls to mind the American film CODA which won the Academy Award for Best Picture a few years ago. That was an inspiring story about a teenage girl who, while supporting and being supported by her deaf family, also pursued her musical dream. In CODA, the deaf family members are portrayed as fully integrated into society, virtually indistinguishable from their neighbors—indeed, the father is even depicted as a leader in his fishing community. But how that considerate, healthy daughter came to be who she is—that was never the story CODA set out to tell.

By contrast, Sorda focuses on the second half of the story: motherhood and early childhood. It offers a candid and sobering portrayal of how difficult life can be for a deaf mother in reality. To accommodate visiting relatives and friends, Héctor gradually falls out of the habit of using sign language at home, even in his interactions with their daughter. For Ángela, this inevitably feels like her child’s birth and growth are step by step pushing her into the margins. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with either partner—Héctor, in fact, could be considered an exceptionally devoted husband—yet the tensions keep surfacing until one day, they erupt.

The scene is one many couples might find familiar. They had planned a holiday trip, but Ángela oversleeps, and Héctor hesitates to wake her. What begins as a petty quarrel—“Why didn’t you wake me up?” / “If you want to go, just go by yourself”—spirals into the collapse of their getaway. In Sorda, Ángela’s identity as a deaf mother turns this into a breaking point where she finally pours out all the frustrations she has been bottling up. Héctor, in the heat of the moment, blurts out, “It’s not my fault you’re like this,” a line that cuts Ángela to the core, leaving her utterly heartbroken.

It is here that the film makes its most striking choice in a formal manner: after more than an hour of conventional, fully audible soundscape, everything suddenly drops into silence. The audience is plunged into Ángela’s world, where communication exists only through visuals, sign language, and body movement.

Ángela drives off alone to meet her deaf friends by the seaside. This total erasure of sound amplifies her isolation and forces us to feel the pain of a communication breakdown—the suffocating weight of emotions that cannot find release. From this moment onward, we are not merely “watching” the story; we are experiencing the very limits of hearing itself. Even when Ángela eventually returns home, reconciles with Héctor, and they patiently find their way back to each other, the film retains its silence. At one point I even wondered if something was wrong with my playback device—only by dragging the timeline back to earlier scenes did I realize this silence was the director’s deliberate design.

Near the end of the film, Ángela attends a prenatal class and finally decides to put on her hearing aid, trying to communicate with the teacher and her daughter. Yet what reaches the audience’s ears is nothing but distorted noise, almost like an electric current. Inevitably, this recalls another hearing-loss story, Sound of Metal, which so heartbreakingly shows drummer Ruben Stone’s altered world once he wears an implant—shrill and piercing. Like Ruben, the Spanish mother in Sorda also ends up removing her hearing aid before the film closes, retreating into complete silence. Whether that counts as a form of acceptance or a kind of renunciation is left for the audience to decide.

The three radically different layers of sound design—normal hearing, total silence, and the distorted soundscape of the hearing aid—force audiences who can hear normally to experience the world as a deaf person might. It is no longer just hearing someone say “Ángela is lonely,” but actually enduring the sensation of being deprived of hearing within the film itself. That approach is inevitably more powerful than relying on dialogue or emotional cues alone, and it makes the cinema, as an audiovisual art, feel all the more precious.