Written by Hannah

I forget where I heard about it…

Somewhere, a few months ago, I heard that the Australian pop star Sia was screenwriting and directing a film called “Music”. The film was supposedly about an autistic teenage girl who had to be taken care of by her sister after her grandmother passed from an unfortunate stroke. I saw the trailers and didn’t like what I saw, but nonetheless I tried to remain open minded. That of course became harder as more and more reviews came out affirming my worst fears; the movie was terrible, and even worse than the trailers showed. Normally in a review I would avoid spoiling a movie like I would avoid the plague, but I wouldn’t recommend this movie at all.

I’m going to be honest, watching this movie was difficult. I honestly wanted to just turn the TV off and walk away multiple times, and a movie has never really bothered me that much. Due to the poor portrayal of autism in this movie, much of the other glaring errors go unnoticed. I am planning on shining a new light on these, as well as bringing up a few of the autism-related issues in the film. After all, I have a sibling who is very close to the autistic character on this film, as far as the autism-spectrum goes anyway.

I’m going to start with what you’ve most likely heard of Sia for, her music career. She has remained very uncontroversial up until this point, with many adoring fans. You may know her from her song “Chandelier”, which was on the radio constantly a few years ago. With such a successful music career, you would think a film with, to quote the advertisement, “10 new Sia songs” would have a much better soundtrack. Many of the songs felt lacking, not that they were terrible or anything, just unimpressive. There were a couple good songs, but many just didn’t catch my interest, and I forgot about them 5 minutes after they played. Overall I can think of 3 songs I liked out of the 10, and while those songs were good that still means that 70% of the soundtrack was unable to captivate my interest.

As far as the acting goes, for most of the characters there aren’t any glaring issues. It’s fine given what they had to work with. The problems arise with Maddie Ziegler’s character, aka the character with autism. Now I’m not blaming her for this, the film started production when she was in her teens, and she probably didn’t have much of a choice of what character she acted. The most common critique of this film is that Sia did not actually get someone on that part of the autism spectrum to play the autistic character. Even less, she had someone neurotypical play the character. This becomes a problem when the acting for the autistic character seems like a parody, and it does. It seems fake, it seems like a stereotype. Looking into this issue I found out that Ziegler had brought these issues to Sia’s attention and expressed worries about playing the character, worries which Sia dismissed.

And now the plot. Oh, the plot. What was the plot? The plot shifts over and over again. First it’s about a sister who is struggling to take care of her autistic sibling, then it is about the sister struggling through rehab and trying not to relapse, then it’s a romance story between the sister and another character (Ebo, and don’t worry, we’ll get to the characters in a second). The plot is a weird, jumbled mess and switches randomly.

And now for the characters. This was probably one of the worst aspects of the film. The main character is a recovering drug addict, alcoholic, and drug dealer named Kazu. No, the person with autism isn’t the main character, and while I feel that the advertising and the title “Music” (the autistic character’s name) were misleading, it’s fine if the main character is the sibling. The problem is her character arc. For most of the movie she is a terrible person, she is rude and inconsiderate, and overall she’s just hard to connect with as a main character. She becomes a better person somewhere in the last third of the movie, and it seemed weird, sudden, and rushed. Her change came after getting drunk one night and injuring her nose after she fell on the sidewalk, but she seems to have been in worse situations and hasn’t changed, so why this? Knowing her character, when you put it in perspective it doesn’t seem as significant.

Of course, there’s Music, the girl with autism. She isn’t given much character and individuality, so there isn’t much to write about here. She is portrayed as having a wild imagination due to her autism, and is shown in the film like she is a mystical, strange, hidden visionary, and her thoughts portray themselves as, how do I describe it? Artsy- music video things? I’ll get to that later. If I’m being honest, I feel like she isn’t portrayed like a person. She’s just portrayed as “The Autism”, “The girl with Autism” etc.

The last significant character is Ebo, and immigrant from Africa. He isn’t a mean character, and there’s not really and glaring flaws with him. My biggest issue is that he is portrayed as the “Autism Whisperer” or something like that. He states overly-simplified facts about autism, and is treated like the magical autism know-it-all. This character is actually the one who introduces restraint into the movie.

For those who don’t know what restraint is, it is a technique that some have used to stop freak-outs from those with autism. The problem is that it does the exact opposite of helping. I’m just going to simplify why it doesn’t work:

What do you think will happen if you grab someone or tackle them to the ground in public, or in private?

Now what do you think would happen if that person was panicked and trying to fight back?

Now, what would happen if that person had a disability and couldn’t even understand what you were doing or why?

People get injured, there have been multiple people with autism killed from restraint. I can leave some links here, actually:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/death-student-autism-leads-manslaughter-charges-against-3-california-school-n1081276

https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/death-school-parents-protest-dangerous-discipline-autistic-disabled/story?id=17702216

My point here is that a film should not promote such harmful practices that have lead to the deaths of those with autism. Of course, there’s other issues with the film, but they are more minor. There are strange music video sequences, where the characters wear strange clothes and dance to songs written and sometimes sung by Sia. In the film Sia has a cameo in which she tries to make herself look good to a cringe worthy level, with no subtlety. Overall, I would not recommend this film whatsoever. My final score is a 3/10. It really isn’t worth watching, and the few decent moments in the film are outnumbered by mediocre and bad ones.