The Sound of a Career on the Line

Read Time:5 Minute, 47 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Decibel
–

Genre: Sci-Fi, Thriller, Music
Year Released: 2024
Runtime: 1h 16m
Director(s): Zac Locke
Writer(s): Stephen Christensen, Matt Wise
Cast: Aleyse Shannon, Stefanie Estes, Colby Groves, Eden Perry, Matt Wise
Where to Watch: available November 7, 2025, on Apple TV and Fandango, followed by an SVOD release on Amazon Prime Video beginning December 1

RAVING REVIEW: DECIBEL locks a musician and a music mogul in an isolated studio and asks a question the music business keeps dodging: what happens to soul when the system optimizes it? The premise is pointed—a promising musician, Scout, is invited to a high-tech recording sanctuary run by Donna, a brilliant, exacting figure who believes the future of music is less about blood and breath and more about training data and control (typical billionaire…). That setup isn’t just timely; it’s personal. Every scene feels like a negotiation between two incompatible definitions of creativity: one that accepts messiness, and one that treats mess as a bug to eliminate.

Aleyse Shannon gives Scout a steadily resourceful presence. She plays a composer who builds songs from the world around her—the scrape of desert wind, the shutter of a door, the texture of space. Shannon lets us see the process: attention to the sounds fading outward, pulling in raw material, and returning with intent. Even as the situation tightens, she never reduces Scout to a victim; the character continues to think, to try to translate constraint into form. That quiet insistence becomes the film’s heartbeat.

Across the console, Stefanie Estes’s Donna is equally compelling—never a caricature, always something more. The choices land in small, precise jolts: the clipped directives, the way she “offers” opportunities that function like ultimatums, the fascination with metrics masquerading as mentorship. Estes avoids pure villainy; Donna truly believes she’s building something superior and that discomfort is a price of progress. The more control she asserts, the more we understand the insecurity underneath. In the film’s best moments, Shannon and Estes meet in the middle of a take, and what should be a musical collaboration plays like contested terrain.

Locke choreographs the environment to reflect that standoff. The studio is a seduction and a snare—glass, screens, immaculate surfaces, a space designed to eliminate friction. That design choice isn’t just aesthetic; it’s thematic. When a room becomes perfectly efficient, what gets lost are the happy accidents and relational compromises that define human art. DECIBEL leans into that discomfort, treating silence, HVAC, and the clinical click of an interface as storytelling elements. More importantly, it lets sound creation play out onscreen. You see Scout capture, arrange, and iterate, and you understand exactly why Donna wants to harness that intuition and feed it to an algorithm. Few films about music actually dramatize the composition process; this one does.

The film lands several clean jabs at the power dynamics of patronage. Money buys time, gear, and access—and in return, it expects obedience. DECIBEL maps those expectations without rhetoric. A seemingly generous offer becomes a monitoring regime; a “note” becomes an order; a safety feature doubles as surveillance. The escalation is credible because it’s incremental. The boundaries don’t vanish; they move. Scene by scene, Scout must decide whether to trade one more inch of autonomy for the promise of a platform. The movie never pretends that choice is simple, and it doesn’t shame the hunger to be heard. That empathy matters.

In terms of character, the arcs are immaculate. Scout begins as an artist negotiating scarcity and ends as one insisting on terms. The shift isn’t a leap; it’s a series of recalculations that pay off when she discovers the limit of what she’s willing to sacrifice. Donna’s arc is a mirror image: she starts as a visionary host and reveals the authoritarian logic beneath the pitch. There’s a smart through-line about tech culture—diagnosis, optimization, prevention—reframed as creative doctrine. That background helps Donna make sense without excusing her.

Crucially, DECIBEL doesn’t reduce the AI question to a scarecrow. It acknowledges why the tools tempt: speed, possibility, a way to sculpt sound beyond human hands. The critique isn’t “technology bad”; it’s “technology unmoored from consent drains meaning.” When the film captures the music live, when you can hear the breath and the micro-imperfections of a performance, the difference is palpable; it’s not nostalgia, but a reminder that risk is the cost of a living art form.

If there’s a bigger takeaway, it’s this: DECIBEL captures an anxiety many artists feel right now without losing sight of character. It’s easy to sermonize about the state of the industry; it’s harder to make you care about one singer and one producer locked in a room. The film earns that investment. Shannon gives you a person worth fighting for. Estes gives you an antagonist who sees herself as the savior. Put them in a pristine lab and ask them to make something beautiful together; you’re going to get sparks.

It’s modest in scale, clear in purpose, and anchored by performances that do the heavy lifting without calling attention to themselves. For a story about machine learning, DECIBEL remembers that taste is a human argument. It ends not with a neat answer but with a renewed appreciation for the messy, unquantifiable parts of making music: the voice, the ear, the decision to stop recording and say no.

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[photo courtesy of PEJECO PRODUCTIONS, THE STRAITS, CHROMA]

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