Tuner (2025)
There is something pleasingly counterintuitive about a film whose protagonist hears the world more acutely than almost anyone alive and uses that gift to steal from it. Tuner holds this contradiction without flinching for much of its running time, and Roher (making his first narrative feature after building his reputation as a documentarian with Navalny in 2022) proves he can carry a story whose pleasures depend on precision and restraint. Coming from years spent watching how real people move through difficult situations, he has found a fictional story whose demands suit him.
Niki White (Leo Woodall) is a piano tuner in New York living with hyperacusis, a condition of extreme auditory sensitivity that compels him to wear noise-cancelling headphones just to survive the ordinary volume of city life. His hearing is acute enough to catch a piano’s fractional imperfections and so unmanageable outside work that the city itself constitutes a kind of daily ordeal. When Niki discovers that the same sensitivity also lets him hear the tumblers of a safe clicking into place, his carefully managed life begins moving in directions he had not planned for. What starts as accidental aptitude gradually becomes an entanglement with people who treat crime as a standing arrangement.
Roher, working from a screenplay co-written with Robert Ramsey, has evident affection for the kind of American indie willing to take a niche subject seriously. The world of piano tuning, which is unglamorous, highly specialised, and oddly intimate, is depicted with genuine curiosity. There is pleasure in simply watching Niki work, in the film’s willingness to let craft be interesting before the plot insists on becoming urgent. This patience is, in my opinion, one of the film’s more underrated qualities.
Woodall’s performance carries real interiority, saying more with a slight adjustment of posture or a fractional delay before meeting someone’s eyes than many actors achieve with extended monologue. His chemistry with Dustin Hoffman (playing Harry, Niki’s mentor and the closest thing the film has to a moral anchor) is warm and convincingly lived-in. Hoffman, who has not always been well-served by his later material, seems genuinely engaged here, and it shows in the specificity of his choices. Havana Rose Liu brings real conviction to a role that, on the page, might have remained merely functional, and Jean Reno and Tovah Feldshuh both register as distinct presences despite limited screen time.
The sound design is, to my mind, among the film’s most original contributions. Roher, working with sound designer Johnnie Burn (a frequent Jonathan Glazer collaborator responsible for the ambient sounds of death looming just offscreen in The Zone of Interest, 2023), constructs Niki’s auditory world as something the audience inhabits alongside him. The film’s sonic perspective earns its place as the primary means through which Niki’s inner life becomes legible.
Where Tuner loses some footing is in its second half, as the crime-thriller machinery asserts itself with more confidence than the film’s quieter elements are quite ready to match. The plot mechanics feel familiar, perhaps more familiar than they need to be, and the third act settles for a resolution that is tidier than the material warrants. In those final sequences, the film stops asking what Niki’s choices have cost him and settles for clearing them away.
Tuner is a controlled, absorbing debut that rewards the attention you bring to it. Roher has made a film that takes its protagonist’s psychology seriously, and that seriousness gives Tuner a warmer pulse than the genre usually produces. It is a modest film with real ambitions, and it largely delivers on them.