“Tuner” made a splash with its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.
With his once-promising musical career over, Niki (Leo Woodall) travels alongside his mentor Harry Horowitz (Academy Award-winner Dustin Hoffman) tuning pianos while encountering a wide range of characters, including an aspiring composer Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu). When these two forge an unexpected connection, Niki’s safecracking side hustle threatens this budding romance pulling him into increasingly dangerous territory.
“Tuner” is a film about creative paralysis and that terrifying space between who you were and who you might become when your identity gets pulled out from under you. If someone’s value is predicated on their art, what happens if they can’t make art anymore? This question circled within the head of Oscar-winning director Daniel Roher (“Navalny”) when he met Peter White, a piano tuner in Los Angeles. Peter’s poetic and almost spiritual relationship to sound was fascinating and directly inspired the character of Niki.
With remnants of “CODA” meets “Good Will Hunting,” the audience is inadvertently reminded just how loud the world can be – especially for Niki, who suffers from acute hyperacusis, a disorder where everyday sounds become intolerably loud, uncomfortable or even painful. It’s a heightened sensitivity to normal sounds that can lead to physical discomfort and psychological distress. Yet, there is nothing distressful about this film or its message.
Leo Woodall and Havana Rose Liu’s chemistry makes audiences fall in love twice. Once with the actors and secondly with the characters they inhabit with every fiber of their soul. Woodall’s flippant exterior masks the loneliness he heartbreaking loneliness he experiences. Liu is a revelation of range. Between her icy characterization of Ruthie to piano playing that transports the audience to another realm. Both Woodall and Liu are megawatt stars in the making.
Of course, with all this drama, welcomed comedic lifts from Hoffman (whose brief yet memorable presence is hardly enough) and (Tovah) Feldshuh counterbalance the heaviness, while spotlighting the realness of dementia, grieving and how life moves on whether we want it to or not.
From the start, the sonic environment is treated as its own character in innovative and immersive ways thanks to executive music producer Marius de Vries, who composed all music performed on-screen by Liu and Woodall (including the big orchestral piece, “Pearl Watch Rhapsody”).
The manner in which sound is utilized to draw parallels between the skillsets of piano tuning and safecracking (both tasks rooted in physicality and sound that require acute sensitivity to touch and acoustics) definitely assists the film in its narrative connections between plot and sonic language.
Scenes in which Niki can call out chords and notes without missing a beat, or moments where Liu and Woodall display more than adequate musical abilities performing technically difficult orchestral opuses, are breathtaking to watch and listen to.
Having had its world premiere at Telluride less than a week ago and seen as a potential acquisition for Black Bear’s new distribution arm, the film (which has now screened at the Toronto International Film Festival) is seen as a prime candidate for distributors going into awards season.
“Tuner” is a gorgeously executed tale and a reminder that it is never too late to tap into a dream, no matter what it may cost or how long it takes to manifest. The wait is always worth the reward.
