There’s no Van Cliburn Competition taking place this summer, but if you yearn to listen to piano music anyway, you could do worse than see Tuner. This fleet, self-contained little New York-set thriller is something that John Cassavetes or Sidney Lumet might have directed 50 years ago, except that even those masters would have trouble directing your attention to the sounds on the soundtrack like this movie does. Tuner opens at three Tarrant County theaters this weekend, and it showcases plenty of up-and-coming talent.
Our main character is Niki (Leo Woodall), a professional piano tuner who drives to mansions all over the Tri-State area and fixes rich people’s often unplayed pianos. He owes his livelihood to his hyperacusis — a rare condition that causes extremely sensitive hearing — and to Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), his mentor who is the closest person he has to family. When Harry suddenly falls ill and turns out to be in a heap of medical debt, Niki seeks help from Uri Stern (Lior Raz), who installs security systems in those nice houses and then robs them when he knows the homeowners are gone. Niki’s medical condition makes him perfectly suited to opening safes by hearing the tumblers in the combination locks, and Uri pays him well for it.
We haven’t seen a movie do so much with sound since A Quiet Place. Niki’s condition makes him self-sufficient, but it also isolates him, and so he’s lucky to have a beautiful composition student named Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu) take interest in him after he repairs her waterlogged piano. Director/co-writer Daniel Roher won an Oscar for his documentary on Alexei Navalny and followed that up with the quite entertaining The AI Doc earlier this year. In this, his fiction debut, he establishes the fine gradations of Niki’s hearing by using different methods to muffle the sound coming through the speakers, as our tuner frequently muffles the world’s din with earplugs and noise-canceling headphones. Late in the film, Niki enters a dance club, and the pulsing electronic beats plus Woodall’s performance bring home how agonizing the place is for him.
Niki’s sheltered lifestyle makes it somewhat credible that he would take Uri’s job without foreseeing that the crook might come down on him if he ever tries to leave Uri’s employ. Not so credible is the 1930s Rolex with a string of pearls as a strap that Niki gives Ruthie. I seriously hate everything about that pearl watch, not just because Niki giving his girlfriend stolen merchandise is foolhardy, but because the timepiece resurfaces in the plot in such a ham-handed, disbelief-stretching way. This late plot development is so fake that it comes dangerously close to wrecking the movie.
Close, but not quite. Composer Marius de Vries contributes Ruthie’s piano-and-orchestra composition, which is a touch bombastic and oddly convincing as the work of a talented student. The actors here are not actually playing the piano, nevertheless the exotically beautiful Liu — her part-European ancestry accounts for her hazel eyes, which is not something you typically see on Asian people — delivers a nicely restrained performance as a serious and studious artist, so that you’d never guess that she gave such a madcap comic turn in Bottoms. As for Woodall, the Englishman who previously acted in Nuremberg and on TV’s The White Lotus does impressively well with the character of a big, strong man who can be made helpless by the sound of a leaf blower. He’s especially good in a scene when Niki snaps at Ruthie and reveals how his hyperacusis robbed him of a career as a concert pianist. Their contributions and Roher’s character work make Tuner a fresh piece of entertainment to consider.
Tuner
Starring Leo Woodall and Havana Rose Liu. Directed by Daniel Roher. Written by Daniel Roher and Robert Ramsey. Rated R.
