Daniel Roher, Academy Award-winning director of the documentary Navalny, makes his narrative feature debut with Tuner, a safe-cracking heist movie starring Leo Woodall, Dustin Hoffman, and Havana Rose Liu. The plot is predictable, the cast is steady, and the creative choices are tried-and-true. As a result, Tuner isn’t breaking any new ground. But what it’s doing, it’s doing very well. Almost too well for a 33-year old director making his first scripted film.
The film follows Leo Woodall’s Niki White, a piano tuner with an allergy to noise. He’s frequently spotted with earplugs and over-the-ear ear protection. This sensitivity to sound gives him an edge in the piano tuning game. It also requires him to have very quiet working conditions, which is how he overhears a group of thieves attempting to steal from a safe in a home where he’s working on a piano. In an effort to get back to his work, he offers to open the safe for them (he conveniently had to learn how to open a safe early in the movie for personal reasons). This kicks off a predictable chain of events—the criminals want him to keep cracking safes for them, and he agrees because he needs money to provide medical care for his mentor Harry (Dustin Hoffman). Along the way, he meets a young composing student (Havana Rose Liu). They have fun banter, Harry pushes them to be together, they resist, but they obviously fall in love along the way.
Where Tuner shines is in its details. As Niki says, “Tuners don’t really use the ‘p-word’ . . . Tuning your piano is about creating harmony out of chaos. To do that, you gotta be okay with imperfection.” Sound editor Johnnie Burn (who won an Oscar for his work on The Zone of Interest) creates harmony out of the chaos of the world of Tuner. Tuner is a film with a heartbeat—safe locks clicking, hospital monitors beeping, piano keys slotting back into place. The sound is so good that you can practically hear the sound of an earplug shifting within Niki’s ear. The story is propelled by these little details, along with a sensational score from Will Bates.
There’s something earnest and authentic about this filmmaking. You can tell that Roher came into the project with a vision and a desire to execute it competently. And he does. Everything clicks into place.
Woodall, Hoffman, and Liu similarly bring competence to the screen. Woodall’s Niki is broody and silent, just trying to keep his head down and get his work done without triggering his condition. He has an endearing rapport with Hoffman, whose Harry is talkative, pushy, and a much-needed dose of comedy. Niki and Harry’s connection is the thread that holds the story together. Even when Harry isn’t on screen, his name is on the van that Niki drives and the jumpsuit that Niki wears, and a bobblehead with Hoffman’s face sits on the dash.
Woodall and Liu also have great chemistry. Liu’s Ruthie pushes Niki out of his small world, while still accepting him for who he is. The actors themselves bring a heat to the screen that was sorely missing from some of Woodall’s previous performances (notably Netflix’s Vladimir, which is one of the least sexy sexual stories that’s come out in recent memory). Part of the allure of Woodall’s portrayal of Niki and Liu’s portrayal of Ruthie are their abilities to display authenticity and competence on the screen, and to be drawn to the other’s competence. You can feel the attraction growing between them as they witness each other doing what they’re best at.
In a digital world that is feeling more and more uniform, it’s deeply refreshing to dive deep into a character’s interests, skills, and quirks. Even when Niki does things that make you want to scream, Woodall’s sheepish, yet confident, portrayal keeps you rooting for him. Niki feels like a real person, and the sound design and editing of the film help bring him beyond the screen. In one of the first interactions between Niki and Ruthie, Niki demonstrates his perfect pitch, playfully prompted by Ruthie on the keys, and the camera slowly zooms in on his face, physically pulling the audience into this character.
Audiences crave seeing people do what they love, which is what Roher was doing in making this movie. Despite his start as a documentarian, he has always wanted to do scripted features. The cast’s solid performances and the strong filmmaking from the crew make this a fully-realized film that allows its characters to be vulnerable, which in turn allows the audience to be invested when those vulnerabilities are exploited. Every piece of this film that needs to work, works—Niki’s condition is believable, the stakes are never outlandish, the custom music is beautiful, and the safe-cracking scenes are compelling. Roher executed Tuner with pitch-perfect precision.
