Tuner Review: All the Right Notes at the Right Time

High art meets low lifes in Tuner, a gritty but charming crime drama set in the unlikely world of piano tuners. Unlikely, that is, unless you grew up on old school heist flicks where some guy would be leaning, sweating, with a stethoscope up against a bank vault, turning the dial and hoping to hear that click-click-clack before the door swings open and the loot is revealed. 

In this case, the skilled thief is Niki (Leo Woodall, Nuremberg, The White Lotus), a taciturn young man whose closest friend and mentor is endearing grump Harry (Dustin Hoffman). Both men have taken to the essential but underappreciated trade of piano tuning as a way to stay near to the object that they love and can never love them back. In no small part due to his declining health, Harry’s performing days are far behind him, while Niki never got the chance to fulfill his prodigious talents. He has hyperacusis, a rare condition that makes him incredibly sensitive to sound. The positive is that, combined with his pitch-perfect hearing, he’s peerless at getting a keyboard to sound just right. It also, he discovers, makes him a great safecracker. As long as it’s the non-digital kind, he can hear the tumblers falling into place, which means your standard hotel four-digit keypad safe is actually more secure than the supposedly secure home vaults of multimillionaires. And, as petty gangster Uri (Lior Roz) explains, the more people have, the less likely they are to miss some of it.

It’s that anti-1% logic, combined with Harry’s mounting medical bills, that convinces Niki that a little bit of safecracking is a victimless crime, especially as it brings him closer to aspiring concert pianist and composer, Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu, Bottoms, Hall & Harper).

There’’ a sense of the classic noir about Tuner. After all, it’s a genre often built around good people doing bad things for good reasons, and the script by Robert Ramsey and director Daniel Roher could have been filmed in the 1950s with ease. Just swap out the subplot about the codes for a crypto wallet with a numbered Swiss bank account and it could be a noir regular like Neville Brand or a young John Cassavetes playing Niki. They’d probably have played the onetime musician as more of a tough guy; instead, Woodall never loses sight of the fact that he’s a gentle soul who’s trying to piece a life together after his dream died. 

If anything, Roher’s decision not to awkwardly update the noir conventions is part of why Tuner is as entertaining as it is. Hoffman and Woodall have an easy uncle/nephew kindliness between them, making it all so plausible that Niki would leap feet first into a life of crime. If anything, the greatest disappointment is that they don’t share more scenes, because late-era Hoffman seems more relaxed as a performer than at any prior point in his career. Harry’s babbling affability and Manhattan crankiness is surprisingly endearing as he unabashedly insults customers to their faces because he knows he’s the best and the cheapest in town. There’s such charm in his scenes with Woodall, and with those they share with Tovah Feldshuh (Kissing Jessica Stein, Armageddon Time), as Harry’s long-suffering but devoted wife, Maria, who mother hens Niki as much as she tut-tuts over her husband’s irascible ways.

Tuner may not be innovative, nor does it distract the audience with too many twiddly bits. Yet there’s a definite delight in hearing the right notes played in the right order. Roher may be best known as a documentarian for award-winning biographical documentaries like Navalny and Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, but his debut narrative feature shows that he would have been at home filming episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Suspense, and that’s no small praise.

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This article appears in May 29 • 2026.