★★★
Daniel Roher’s Tuner, the story of a gifted piano tuner whose acute hearing pulls him into crime, plays out with the symmetry of a festival-friendly parable. It premiered at Telluride, but its spirit is Sundance to the core: this is a film of tidy arcs, mechanical redemption, and prepackaged lessons that arrive like clockwork.
Leo Woodall is decent as the lead, coming off like a less off-putting Michael Pitt. Dustin Hoffman repeats his genial-yet-spiky elder-sage routine, and Havana Rose Liu does her best to inject some life into a script that mistakes minor-key sentiment for depth. The robber crew that our hero falls in with are by turns cartoonish, loveable and sinister, but always entertaining, while the sound design and Marius de Vries’s music are strong and alive.
But all this can’t disguise how safe the storytelling feels. It’s like what you’d get if you dropped the basic synopsis and a copy of Save The Cat into a generative AI. Everything is too neat, too schematic. Tuner hits all the right notes. But so would a punchcard player-piano.
Tuner played as the Surprise Film at the London Film Festival.
Whitlock&Pope 