Tuner: Daniel Roher’s stylish neo-noir finds surprising harmony between crime and romance

In the movies, stethoscopes are used as often for safe-cracking as they are for medical purposes, which is to say that it is hard to write an original crime story. With his first fiction feature, Daniel Roher has pulled it off. Tuner, co-written with Robert Ramsey, is a beautifully constructed film about beautifully constructed things: pianos, watches, concertos – and safes. Leo Woodall plays Niki, a young piano tuner in business with the octogenarian Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), who has a client list, managed by his wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), but no longer plays an active role. A gifted pianist in childhood, Niki has a hearing condition that is mostly a curse but partly a blessing: his hearing is too sensitive, which is useful for tuning pianos, and which also means that, when confronted with a tempting safe, he can make do without a stethoscope.

The film begins with an extended comic montage sequence which establishes that very few people care about piano tuning: all of Harry’s clients, scattered around New York (though it might as well be Toronto, where Tuner was actually shot), are rich, and most are tasteless. They see pianos as ornaments and tuners as handymen who might be repurposed for any given domestic task. Niki’s relations with musicians, in the person of concert pianist and aspiring composer Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), are more fraught and more interesting: there the resentment is mutual, she needing him to do her job, he coveting her job. As in a film noir, this background of frustration – the put-upon solo operator serving dumb money – becomes meaningful and less comic when Harry falls ill and Niki needs to pay his medical bills (perhaps justifying the US setting after all). Suddenly the offer of safe-cracking work coming from a dodgy security firm run by Uri (Lior Raz) seems attractive.

If the set-up of an outwardly decent man driven to crime by circumstance and hidden demons is noir-ish, Roher’s style is not. Tuner is stylishly shot, but is really distinguished by Greg O’Bryant’s editing and the film’s complex soundtrack, with sound design credited to Max Behrens, previously credited on The Zone of Interest (2023). As well as the music, which includes Will Bates’s part-jazz, part-electronic score, Marius de Vries’s piano compositions for Ruthie, and some vintage tracks by Harry’s in-film friend Herbie Hancock, the soundtrack is frequently tuned into Niki’s way of hearing, deliberately suppressed except when working or when others in the criminal fraternity decide to punish him, which with some inevitability they do more than once. Niki’s need for silence when working enables the film to show how noisy ‘silence’ can be.

What is definitely un-noir-ish and contemporary is the central relationship between Niki and Ruthie, two zillennials who have met and have some level of attraction for one another, but who have to be practically forced to talk on second meeting, by Harry, and who even then can barely converse. Eventually they find a way; but unlike any noir couple, neither has any burning need to be with the other, which poses a problem for the film, in that its structure, ‘well-made’ in a way that would be recognisable to a Victorian playgoer or 1940s cinemagoer, is practically designed to produce a resounding ending, whether happy (they end up together) or not (one dies or goes to prison). Everything else about the story is neatly resolved, but the relationship between this pair cannot or will not be: Ruthie half-recoils from the word ‘boyfriend’, so what are they?

Tuner has a way of commenting on this: tuners, says Niki, don’t like “the P-word” – perfect – since if even one note sounds that way, it is only one of 88, to be played in combination with others, and the struggle to create harmony from chaos can never attain perfection. In the film’s crucial and most discordant scene, Ruthie practices her own composition for a performance that could make her career, while a distracted Niki contemplates having to do the proverbial ‘one last job’ for Uri, after one that went violently wrong. When Ruthie asks for his opinion, he initiates a row that culminates in him saying he was a better pianist than she ever was – finally his resentment, born of envy, comes into the open, a far from perfect state of affairs. Roher provides a satisfyingly unsatisfying, perfectly imperfect ending, with a great flourish that draws attention to this loose end that can’t be tied.

► Tuner is in UK cinemas 29 May.