By Dan Skip Allen  

Thrillers come in all shapes and sizes, and so do heist movies. Daniel Roher, the director of the Oscar winning documentary Navalny, steps in to direct his first live action film. He uses the main characters’ hearing disability to create a tense pressure filled drama with tough decisions. Roher is able to put the viewer in the shoes of the main character. That’s what makes this film so interesting. His hearing disability makes it so we the audience feel sorry for this man who is caught in with the wrong people. It could happen to anybody but specifically because of his problem.

Niki (Leo Woodall ) is a mild-mannered piano tuner in New York City. He works for Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), who owns a van, and they go around together, fixing pianos around town. When Hoffman’s character falls out ill, his wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh) convinces the assistant to keep working to help pay the bills. While doing a job, the Woodall character meets some men who offer him some good money for cracking safes because of his hearing abnormality. He turns the man, Uri (Lior Raz), down, but eventually comes back to him because he wants to help his mentor out by buying his van and helping pay his medical bills. While doing a job at a concert hall, he meets a beautiful composition student, Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), who he befriends. They get to know each other very well. He has to try to balance his work with his new relationship. Things start to get complicated, though.

Roher and Robert Ramsey wrote this script with a sense of dramatic flavor to it. They put the viewer in the shoes of the main character. With his hearing abnormalities, we feel what he’s feeling. Certain things cause him to have issues with his hearing. When things start to go south with his new friends, that causes him trouble with his girlfriend. Things start to get entangled, and he has a hard time trying to figure out what to do to get himself out of the trouble he finds himself in. It’s a bit of a predicament. That’s what causes the drama and tense situation in the story. It’s kind of predictable in a way, though, even though it’s still engaging throughout the film. I’ve seen similar stories done slightly differently before.

There are a few technical things about the movie that I am fascinated by. First was a cold opening that used sound, music, and score, and another montage that did the same. The editing on these scenes couldn’t have been easy. I loved how the audience watching the film got to follow along with the van driving around from place to place going to all the various jobs the two men were doing. These scenes gave the sense that these were two working guys going around doing their job helping people. It was a nice added touch to the thriller aspect the film had.

Leo Woodall is a young actor I’ve seen in a few things like “Nuremberg”, the WWII film about the Nazi’s on trial for crimes against humanity. He did a great job as one of the men who worked in the prison where Crowe’s character was being held. He’s also appeared in The White Lotus and other television/streaming shows. He’s a young actor I’ve admired who has a lot of potential. Here, he owns the screen in every scene he’s in. As someone who has a brother with a hearing problem, I can relate to this man. I felt for what he was going through quite a bit because I had many mentors similar to the Hoffman character. I would have done a similar thing if I were in his shoes given the circumstances. He’s a character that you can’t help but get behind. Woodall draws you in with his performance. 

One of the nice parts of this story is the relationship between the Woodall and Rose Liu characters. Their love of classical music is very evident in the context of the story. Because of this, they bond with each other quite well. It takes a special ear to write or even know how to make music like what is shown in this movie.The classical music is like a character. The story uses the music to get into the heads of the characters to an extent. It’s an extension of who these two people are and why they get along with each other so well. I was genuinely interested in their relationship. It’s cool to see the script use each of the things about these two people’s personalities as a part of the story.

As someone with a disability and a brother with hearing loss, I could relate to “Tuner” quite a bit. I could relate to the main character on a personal level more than other characters in films I’ve seen. Woodall is an actor I felt made me very sympathetic to his plight within the context of the story. He has the ability to make you care about him. The story as a whole was quite engaging as well. It combined heist elements with aspects of family and caring about people. It also had a fantastic relationship. The Rose Liu and Hoffman characters added depth to the story. The technical stuff involving the editing and so forth were well done. As a first-time narrative director, Roher did a great job of combining various things to give this story a lot of flair and interesting elements. This isn’t a normal story. It has a lot of stuff I haven’t seen before in this sort of story. That’s why it’s so good and I enjoyed it quite well.

4 stars