“Here is an old-school thriller – the sort they don’t make any more – that makes cunning use of two fine actors born 59 years apart,” said Donald Clark in The Irish Times.
British actor Leo Woodall – “so good in ‘The White Lotus’ and ‘Nuremberg’” – plays Niki, a piano tuner with “perfect pitch and painful oversensitivity to everyday sound”. Dustin Hoffman, now 88 and “just as sharp as he was when jousting with Anne Bancroft in ‘The Graduate’”, stars as his mentor, Harry.
You could just have sat back and enjoyed two hours of their “gently amusing dialogue”. But “there must be a plot”, so at work one day, Niki discovers that his super-hearing makes him good at safe-cracking. To pay Harry’s medical bills, he starts working for a gang targeting Manhattan’s super rich. The Russian gangster stuff “becomes a bit overheated”, and Niki’s slide into criminality is implausible; rather better is the “tentative romance” he starts with a gifted pianist (Havana Rose Liu). But even in the messy second half, the film remains very watchable, thanks to its witty script and fine performances.
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This easy-to-like movie has given Woodall his first “star vehicle”, and he proves himself “ready to take the wheel”, said Harry Stainer in Empire. Niki is confident at work but less assured around people, and Woodall switches between these two modes with quiet confidence.
Another star here is the sound design. “Not since ‘Whiplash’ has a film made audiences so aware of every note, key or click.” We hear the world as Niki hears it, and it makes for “nerve-crunching tension”. The story has gasp-worthy twists, but “Tuner” is more than just a heist thriller, said Katie Walsh in the Los Angeles Times. Director Daniel Roher adds “layers of culture, character and music”. This is intelligent, adult filmmaking.
