Opening this Friday before going wider next weekend is Daniel Roher’s Tuner, which made an unexpected but pleasant splash at the 2025 Telluride International Film Festival, before going on to play Toronto, London, Sundance, and Florida Film Festivals. Black Bear, a mensch, is releasing. They get an individual shoutout for actually giving me an accessible screener with audio description. It’s not their first time doing it, and while I beg, scrape, and claw my way through a sea of films unaware that blind film critics are a thing (naturally, because blind people exist, theretofore, we exist in the same spaces as everyone else), Black Bear did me a solid. I appreciate it. That being said, if Tuner had sucked, it would have been the hardest 180 to make in the next paragraph. That being said, thankfully, it doesn’t.

Which it absolutely could have. While Daniel Roher directs this well, he’s also the director behind Blink,a film that celebrates a bucket list for kids experiencing vision loss, with absolutely no focus on what the rest of their lives would be like, or having their parents try to get them pointed in the right direction while also traversing the globe. I assumed those kids died, because that was the tone. Their blindness killed them, and they never got to learn how to become productive adults. So, it’s amazing that Tuner, which has its lead with a disability of sorts works so well. Here, Nicky (Leo Woodall) has a condition called hyperacusis, a condition where his hearing is overclocking every sound, almost like the opposite of deafness. It could be seen as a superpower of sorts in the wrong hands, but we very much experience Nicky’s pain when loud sounds do invade his space. Sometimes it is by accident, and other times someone is using sound against him, and it is completely disarming when it happens.

Nicky is a piano tuner apprentice, a very necessary thing in the real world, as there are almost no piano tuners, and they are all old like Henry (Dustin Hoffman). While not everyone owns a piano, there are enough of them, enough performing venues, schools, and everything in between that if there is only one or two in any given city, they do get constant work. So, Nicky, with his unique hearing, is perhaps more suited to being a piano tuner. Not just because his hearing allows him to hear the piano better than anyone, but usually because his job requires silence otherwise, which is something he rarely ever gets. He has to wear noise cancelling headphones all the time to try and reduce the sound coming from the world around him.

But, Henry is old, and something happens to him, which puts Nicky up at bat. He’s now the one who has to keep working and keep the money flowing for his sake, and for Henry’s. Although, he’s young, and banks won’t give him the time of day. Henry has a safe that he can’t remember the combination to, and Nicky agrees to take a look at it. After watching YouTube videos, and chain smoking, he realizes his hearing allows him to hear the little locks as they spin into place, so he can crack safes.

While he’s at a job, he ends up running into a “security” team, clearly not doing security, and their noise is disrupting his tuning. He offers to help them with their “security” if they’ll stop the noise and go away so he can do his job. He easily opens the safe, and heads back to work. The leader of the gang drops him some cash and a business card.

The offer becomes too tempting, as Nicky has mad bills to pay, for himself and Henry, and he’s just started up a relationship with a new piano prodigy, Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), so the extra cash is welcomed. Everything seems easy at first, though is becomes far less ambiguous about which side of the law he’s now flirting with, even as his new boss paints it more as a Robin Hood type thing. Rich people have so much, they don’t notice what’s missing. Hello, Your Friends And Neighbors. For anyone who sat through Season 1 of Jon Hamm’s series, that was basically the premise, and just like in that show, a watch becomes a huge plot point. Can Nicky get in and out with just enough, or will the underbelly decide his special abilities are too good to give up?

I’ve seen critics and friends compare this to everything from Baby Driver to Whiplash. It might have shades of Baby Driver, in that our lead is particularly good at one thing, which is exploited, and Whiplash, because the sound design thing here is amazing. However, if you’re expecting Dustin Hoffman to go JK Simmons on Leo Woodall, that is so far from their dynamic. I would also add a bit of Thelma, in that sort of crime-adjacent film you weren’t expecting, and ahs its own quirky vibe sort of way, and features a lovely octogenarian performance.

Tuner does have a lot of potential to be one of the indie crowdpleasers of the summer, a film that doesn’t open big, but thrives on word of mouth. I think it is smart for Black Bear to open this outside awards season, as this doesn’t really scream Oscars to me. It isn’t that the film isn’t great, it is more like where does it fit in? Like Thelma, which really only ever had a shot for June Squibb in Lead Actress, it feels like a film that would be on the fringe no matter where it opened, and the summer gives it breathing room away from the obvious Oscar bait. Plus, I’m sure Black Bear is frustrated by the lack of appreciation last year at the Oscars for Christy, and Sydney Sweeney, Ben Foster, and Merrit Weaver, who all delivered awards worthy performances.

Hoffman might be the draw, but he’s sidelined for most of the film, and the parts he are in feel so hands off. It has that vibe that ROher just had Hoffman be himself, and this role is an approximation of what an SNL cast member might do if they were doing a Dustin Hoffman impersonation. Again, not a bad performance, but very much leaning on the Hoffman of it all. This film lives and dies with Leo Woodall, an actor rapidly on the rise. I enjoyed his performances last year in Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy and Nuremberg, and he was solid in Apple’s Prime Target. With the right roles, he has every opportunity to move into the same kind of position Noah Centineo Nicholas Galitzine, or Jacob Elordi find themselves in as young, rising male talent, waiting for an opportunity to prove they have box office star power. Perhaps Tuner will position him even more as a rising star.

I think Tuner has a good shot at being a Top 25 film for me, but maybe not Top 10. While I had a lot of fun with it, and found the performances strong, I thought we moved a bit forcefully and quickly into the relationship with Ruthie. It moves at the pace the film needs it to, not at a natural pace, often skipping forward in time to suggest progress has been made between them, but off screen, in between Nicky’s jobs. Considering how pivotal his connection to Ruthie is in the end, I never felt they made that connection, which makes his choices feel a bit stretched beyond what an audience would expect. To be fair to Havana Rose Liu, I don’t think she does a poor job, I just don’t think we give her enough to do. To compare this to Whiplash, while he does have a love interest in the film (played by Melissa Benoist), the crux of the film never involves him having to throw it all away for her, or putting her at the center of everything, so his decisions become about her. Considering Nicky started doing all of this to help Henry, I needed a bit more to understand why Ruthie became the focus.

And, not to bite the hand that feeds, but this is functional audio description. I can’t say it is great audio description. It is one of those tracks where the writer has decided that if it is referenced at all verbally by an actor at any point, then we probably won’t get the description, so something might happen, and we wait for someone to mention it. There are several missed transitions, character descriptions are pretty low to non-existent, and we’re back to Strawberry Shortcake as the narrator. It’s that voice I’ve come to question whether or not it is human, because she refuses to ever be credited. You know what else is never credited? AI. A solid nod to text-to-speech is an audio description track with a writer, but no narrator. I’ve heard her voice numerous times, and she alludes credits, so I can pick her name. Ms Shortcake has a lovely voice, and if she’s in witness protection, I can assure her there are other professionals working in audio description not using their real names. Make up one. Live your rockstar dream. Narrated By Angel Heart. Also, work with better companies if you are indeed human, and not AI. You deserve better.

Tuner never goes flat, staying on pitch for a smart, stylish, genre converging mix of humor, drama, and suspense. Who knew being a piano tuner was so exciting?

Fresh: 8.6/10