‘Tuner’ Review: Dustin Hoffman’s Piano Lesson is so Tightly Wound it Plays Entirely Off Key [D] Telluride
In the new film Tuner, an aging piano tuner and his young apprentice and assistant trapeze around the Tri-State area fine tuning pianos mostly for music schools and the wealthy. Being perfectly on pitch makes sense for music, and is needed for the instrument to sound right. But the filmmakers behind this project take the conception of fine tuning way too far when it comes to the film’s script and story, with the end result a product that is so tightly wound it ends up sounding entirely off key.
Dustin Hoffman is the octogenarian Harry, and Leo Woodall (from Netflix’s series, Vladimir) is Niki, his apprentice. Both are talented musicians in their own right, but Niki suffers from an allergy to loud sounds that requires him to wear earpieces to drown out most noises. This ruins his music career, but makes him a prodigal piano tuner—and, eventually, a master safe cracker as well, as the movie’s plot explains upfront.
Daniel Roher, who won an Oscar for directing the documentary Navalny, is the writer-director behind Tuner. Early on, the movie firmly announces itself as the first-time narrative feature of a documentary filmmaker. Every plot point is laid out in specific detail. The reason behind everything Tuner does is announced with a loud, noisy crescendo.
Most ear splitting of all is the pains Roher takes to tell you that Niki, despite being about to embark on a crime spree, is a kid with good intentions. He only even realizes he can crack safes because his beloved Harry is suffering from dementia and misplaces his hearing aids in a vault and then conveniently forgets the combination.
And he only gets into safe cracking because he is asked to come back to a house where he is doing a tune job later that night, and happens to run into safe thieves. Even then, he only agrees to do work with them because Harry gets sick. And, even then, he only finally goes through the first crack because he is told that the target is a rich asshole who made his money selling subprime loans to minority lenders. The heavy-handedness is so painfully obvious—you are supposed to forgive Niki’s crimes and root for him to be absolved—that you are left to wonder why you should bother with watching the rest of the movie to begin with.
The same, painstaking, and utterly unbelievable contrivances play out to get Niki to meet his love interest Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), an aspiring musician at a local prestigious music school. Niki is a quiet, brooding, good young man. He ambles around cracking safes, tuning pianos, and having hackneyed romantic dates with Ruthie. He plays the role with a very obvious ‘Rain Man’ quality. So much so that at some point one of the thugs he associates with unsubtly calls him that, in one of the film’s many, many indelicate moments.
Ironically, try as it may to make the characters likable, Tuner is so garish in its devices that it achieves precisely the opposite. Ruthie is the kind of person who, when Niki gives her a perfect idea for her concerto, says “that is so annoying” rather than “thank you,” and who later condescends the blue-collar piano tuner she chose to date. Niki is supposed to be a nice natural guy, too, but Woodall is entirely out of his element here. Hoffman shows up for a couple of scenery chewing moments but is mostly discarded, used only to bring a big name onto the marquee.
The plot also ends up precisely in the opposite place than the filmmakers clearly intended. Rather than a symphonic story, it is so purposefully congruous that it becomes entirely not so, devolving into a tedious mush of repeated situations of unbelievable danger and even less convincing escapes. The ultimate plot twists that bring the proceedings to their crash landing are so absurdly unbelievable that you would be forgiven for groaning atop of the piano falsettos.
At some point when he is tuning a piano with Ruthie, Niki explains the harmony between a single key and the entirety of an instrument’s functioning. One key can be chaotic, but the point is to make all the keys work together into perfect harmony. This may very well make perfect sense for a piano, but to the extent this is clearly Roher explaining his own theory of filmmaking, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard.
Movies are supposed to be slightly chaotic, and certainly unpredictable. If they are finetuned to the last key, made pitch perfect to hit every note, they are typically a fairy tale, or a Disney movie. Tuner is neither of those. To the contrary, it aspires very much to be an adult movie, as its caper-like second half portends.
Unfortunately, to be effective in conveying actual danger or even an actual plot that needs to be solved, a movie needs to be not so carefully laid out from its beginning, as if carefully written notes on a pentagram. The effort to so carefully calibrate every single point is appreciated, but the end result is totally unharmonious, and even deafening.
Grade: D
This review is from the 2025 Telluride Film Festival where Tuner had its world premiere. There is no distributor at this time.
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