Tuner wants to be a highbrow heist film. It’s middlebrow meh instead.
Courtesy Black Bear
Early on in Tuner, apprentice piano tuner Niki (Leo Woodall) walks composition student Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu) to class at a conservatory in Manhattan. Niki nervously comments on an original piece he heard Ruthie working on the day before, noting composers he heard similarities to. He’s trying to impress her, but it has the opposite effect. Ruthie thinks he’s calling her work derivative, and she walks off, insulted.
It’s hard, at times, not to think about this conversation as Tuner goes on. It’s perfectly fine if a piece of art contains similarities or references to other work—it’s pretty much impossible to find art of any kind that doesn’t belie its sources of inspiration. However, if you want whatever you make to transcend its influences, it needs a voice of its own to achieve escape velocity. More than that, that voice needs to be interesting enough that audiences don’t keep comparing it to similar work.
In Tuner’s case, the movie it pulls from most is Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver. That movie has flaws, but its central concept—a man with tinnitus uses his love of music to develop his skills as a getaway driver—and the colorful, technically precise execution of that concept were undeniably entertaining. Tuner plays in similar, slightly elevated territory: Niki is a former piano prodigy with hyperacusis that makes him ultra-sensitive to sound, a seeming curse until he discovers it’s a superpower for cracking safes.
But rather than play with color or rhythm or, y’know, sound, director and co-writer Daniel Roher (the celebrated documentarian behind Navalny and this year’s The AI Doc: Or, How I Became an Apocalyoptimist) turns everything down to a serious grey palette befitting of the film’s cosmopolitan setting.
We meet Niki working alongside his mentor Harry (Dustin Hoffman), a former jazz musician turned piano repairman. Niki is mostly able to get through life wearing a pair (and sometimes two pairs) of earplugs that keep him from painful sensory overload. On a job one night, Niki encounters a group of “security experts” who exploit their knowledge of clients’ schedules to rob them. Niki’s ultra-sensitive hearing means he has a surprising aptitude for sensing the inner workings of safe locks, and the crew’s leader Uri (Lior Raz) quickly realizes the kid’s got potential.
What Niki thinks is a one-off job becomes a series of jobs as Uri leans on him more and more, and Niki’s financial troubles (and blossoming relationship with Ruthie) demand more money than piano tuning jobs offer. The robberies seem relatively harmless at first—the victims are rich, insured folks of largely shady means. But of course, the consequences eventually hit close to home, just as it becomes clear that Uri is never going to let Niki out of his clutches.
What Tuner does have going for it is Niki’s relationship with Ruthie, who the film treats as a fully-formed person in her own right. The circumstances that bring the two together (a leaky apartment ceiling nearly destroys her beloved piano, so she calls the one repair guy she knows) are charming. As we see Ruthie prepare for an important recital, it’s also clear she has enough confidence to get by on her own. This isn’t an all-consuming relationship, but one between two people who have their own stuff going on and like being together. It’s a refreshing take that also feels authentic to the way relationships actually work.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn’t nearly as refreshing. Niki’s professional adventures—both legal and criminal—are largely presented in a series of sharply-edited montages. That makes sense for his tuning work (it’s a lot of the same stuff over and over), but it’s a missed opportunity to build tension in the safecracking arena, especially when one of those barely-explored heists has bigger consequences later on. To that end, the movie’s last 20 minutes are a clumsy accumulation of plot and stakes, as if Roher and co-writer Robert Ramsey suddenly realized they needed to kick this sucker into gear.
Tuner sets out to be a version of Baby Driver your mom would see at Glenwood Arts (no shade to moms, Glenwood Arts, or moms who go to Glenwood Arts—just in case my own mom reads this). However, its lightly highbrow aspirations translate into a fairly bland lack of style, and a disinterest in creating the tone and building the tension necessary to make its story compelling. It ends up being the kind of movie your mom finds on Kanopy (again, no shade to moms or Kanopy), enjoys, then forgets about a week later.
