Tuner (2025)

A onetime musical prodigy with a hearing ailment breaks open the code to his heart

Tuner (2025)

In theaters, limited. Opens wide May 29.

High/low. Movies can tug a character, and the audience, in both directions. Up or down. Which direction wins out? We may pull for a person while fate has other designs on him.

When we first meet Niki (Leo Woodall, Nuremberg, The White Lotus), an amiable but profoundly closed-off look lies across his face.

He looks as though something is tying him in knots and he hasn’t freed himself yet. It doesn’t seem as if relief will be coming any time soon.

Our worry about Niki is well-founded. He works as a piano tuner with Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman, as puckishly charming as ever). Harry is an old friend of Niki’s late father and has become a father-substitute to Niki.

Harry owns a piano tuning business that, now that he’s older and growing forgetful, he’s no longer able to operate. He can’t summon the concentration required for delicate piano tuning.

Niki, gifted with perfect pitch, has the ears for it. He was a piano child prodigy and once dreamed of a musical career.

But while still young he developed hyperacusis, an acute hearing sensitivity. Loud noise causes him excruciating pain. To ward it off he wears ear plugs and when surrounding sound gets too loud, he adds noise-canceling headphones.

The condition has kept him isolated and lonely, and Harry and his wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh) make up all he has to call a family.

In a van Niki and Harry tool around New York City fixing grand pianos of the elite, most of whom rarely even play their Steinways and Yamahas. But a neglected instrument still needs tuning.

And, the script makes clear, a stifled life could use shaking up. On one late night job Niki goes alone to a wealthy residence where noise from upstairs prevents him from working. He goes up one floor to find Uri (Lior Raz) and two companions trying to open a safe.

They explain they’re the owner’s “security” team and they’ve mislaid the combination. By any chance could Niki help them out?

As it happens, Niki can. A few days earlier Harry had forgotten the combination to his safe. Niki hauled it home and, guided by a YouTube video, opened it by placing his sensitive ears next to it to hear the tumblers click into place.

Believing Uri’s story that he and his friends are on the premises legitimately, Niki opens the safe. A grateful Uri gives Niki cash and his phone number. Call me, kid, if you ever need some quick money.

We’re at a classic movie high/low crossroad. Writer-director Daniel Roher, an Oscar-winning documentarian making his first feature, confronts Niki with dicey, dangerous choices.

Harry falls seriously ill and Marla desperately informs Niki that Harry has let his health insurance coverage lapse. Medical bills are mounting and both Harry and the tuning business are in jeopardy.

A deeply reluctant Niki joins Uri and his team, by now fully understanding that they’re thieves. But Niki needs the money.

Along with this dark turn, the double-edged script, co-written with Robert Ramsey, gives Niki a high road to follow, too.

The sound design by Johnnie Burns is what propels the action. His work here is breathtaking as he takes us inside Niki’s head tuning piano keys with pinpoint precision – high. And as Niki listens to a safe’s tumblers click into place to spring doors open on about-to-be-stolen jewelry and cash – low.

In crucial ways, the sound here is the story.

While tuning a piano at a music conservatory he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), also a piano prodigy, who’s on her way to a career breakthrough.

All this could seem formulaic: a guy in deeper trouble than he realizes meets a girl who may provide a romantic, and musical, alternate path for him. But events aren’t quite so tidy.

High and low collide. Niki becomes so entangled with Uri and his gang of thugs they won’t let him stop doing jobs for them.

And besides being a highly skilled pianist Ruthie is an ambitious composer. She has an upcoming recital that could secure her an internship with world-renowned composer Marius Maissner (Jean Reno).

Little does Niki know that his thievery will be tied to that very composer and to Ruthie’s possible future.

The suspense and thrilling music kept me thoroughly engrossed. Will Bates deploys a jazzy score that has the bounce and flair of a jangling New York City, risky and promising all at once.

In Bates’ layering of recorded songs, when he needle-dropped Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man”, I knew I was in the hands of a cool cat. Hancock himself makes a lovely cameo appearance.

But the sound design by Johnnie Burns is what propels the action. Burns won an Oscar for his sound design of The Zone of Interest, and he also did the piquant period sound for Hamnet.

His work here is breathtaking as he takes us inside Niki’s head tuning piano keys with pinpoint precision – high. And as Niki listens to a safe’s tumblers click into place to spring doors open on about-to-be-stolen jewelry and cash – low.

In crucial ways, the sound here is the story.

Woodall scores a major career breakthrough as Niki. It’s a recessive, held-in leading role that has to keep us engaged. With his luminous, still eyes, seemingly always on the verge of tears, Niki aches with a disturbing quietude.

The actor draws us into a man who’s keeping everyone away. The buoyant romance with Ruthie ripens only because Niki, swooning, conceals from her what he’s criminally tied to.

And neither of them is prepared when her drive for success and his for survival intersect. It helps that Liu can play both wary and smitten, that Ruthie wants to believe in Niki but at the same time refuses to set her career prospects aside.

Their seesawing tension keeps the story grounded in recognizably human stakes, not simply musical wizardry or dastardly criminal doings.

With bright immersive cinematography from Lowell A. Meyer and dazzling split-second editing by Greg O’Bryant, Roher as director shows he knows how to marshal and steer a crack team.

Roher won his Oscar for the documentary Navalny and makes a formidable debut as a feature director who can keep visuals, sound and lived-in performances in exquisite balance.

He’s a meticulous craftsman and sensitive writer who we can expect to go high, low and lots of places in between in the future.