{"id":34092,"date":"2025-08-31T04:48:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T04:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/34092\/"},"modified":"2025-08-31T04:48:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T04:48:07","slug":"an-offbeat-indie-thats-far-better-than-it-sounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/34092\/","title":{"rendered":"An Offbeat Indie That’s Far Better Than It Sounds"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tDustin Hoffman and Leo Woodall make quite the pair in \u201cTuner<\/a>.\u201d Hoffman\u2019s character, veteran piano technician Harry Horowitz, is losing his hearing, while his people-shy apprentice (played by \u201cWhite Lotus\u201d breakout Woodall) has a condition called hyperacusis, which obliges Niki to wear earplugs at all times. Even the slightest sounds bother him, but despite that, this pair are the best piano tuners in town.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s not about hearing. It\u2019s about feeling,\u201d Harry explains, and the same goes for Daniel Roher<\/a>\u2019s pitch-perfect indie drama, which cleverly plays our emotions without resorting to cheap manipulation. (Hearing certainly helps, however, since you\u2019d otherwise miss out on some excellent original music by Marius de Vries.) You might recognize Roher as the Oscar-winning director of \u201cNavalny,\u201d although his genre-straddling first narrative feature couldn\u2019t be more different.<\/p>\n

\n\tA laid-back rom-com crossed with a low-key crime thriller, combined with something more serious \u2014 unafraid to ask existential questions about overcoming a handicap that directly impacts one\u2019s art \u2014 \u201cTuner\u201d feels like the discovery of the Telluride Film Festival<\/a>, where it world-premiered without a distributor in place. Roher\u2019s likable debut feels more like a throwback to well-written, character-driven \u201990s dramas like \u201cGood Will Hunting\u201d and \u201cShine,\u201d or last year\u2019s \u201cThelma\u201d (which proves the endangered category ain\u2019t dead yet).<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTuner\u201d opens with business as usual, as Harry and Niki make the rounds, calibrating personal pianos for rich New Yorkers. Most of their clients never play, treating their instruments like high-end furniture \u2014 though the pianos need tuning regardless (just one of a dozen intriguing facts about their overlooked profession). It\u2019s a highly specialized skill, but that doesn\u2019t stop customers from asking these musical repair men to fix a toilet or reset the router now and then.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe movie\u2019s opening minutes give us a taste of such humiliations, letting Harry (who has a big mouth and an even bigger personality) suck up most of the oxygen. Niki indulges him, looking up to Harry and his devoted wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh) like they were his own parents. He\u2019s a good kid who discovers almost by accident that his hearing condition has an upside: His ears are so sensitive, he manages to open the portable safe to which Harry forgot the combination.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn another job in an extravagant mansion, he\u2019s disturbed by a loud noise upstairs. When Niki snoops around to investigate, he finds three guys with foreign accents trying to force their way into a safe. Their leader, Uri (Lior Raz), claims he handles security for the same client who handled Niki, and the guileless young man takes them at their word, even though it seems clear to us that they\u2019re stealing.<\/p>\n

\n\tUri leaves Niki a tip and suggests that there\u2019s more easy money to be had, if he will just lend them his ears \u2014 an irresistible financial offer, considering Harry\u2019s sky-high hospital bills. There\u2019s something a little too convenient about this arrangement, and audiences would be right to be wary. But there\u2019s not much else going on in Niki\u2019s life, until he discovers Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a talented music composition student who\u2019s living the dream Niki once held (Henry keeps referring to him as the best piano player he ever heard).<\/p>\n

\n\tHoffman isn\u2019t in the movie as much as you might like, but when he\u2019s on screen, a script already brimming with warmth and humor (which Roher co-wrote with Robert Ramsay) foams over in the best possible way. Take the scene where the jazz-loving codger attempts to play matchmaker between Niki and Ruthie, not realizing they\u2019ve already met, when Niki tuned the conservancy\u2019s concert piano, and she tested his pitch \u2014 a sexy scene where Harry\u2019s strong-silent-type assistant reveals his true skills. It\u2019s in that moment that Woodall\u2019s star potential seems clear, as he rattles off notes like his \u201cRain Man\u201d co-star.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the attraction between Niki and Ruthie blossoms, his involvement with the so-called security team (who are routinely stealing from their employers) gets increasingly complicated. Although he\u2019s a sweet guy, Niki makes some pretty boneheaded decisions, which could prove dangerous if and when he decides to bow out of raiding rich people\u2019s houses. The \u201cTuner\u201d script is expertly structured in the way it sets up certain elements and then pays them off later, like Niki\u2019s reluctance to play the piano and the challenge it will pose if Ruthie gets selected to apprentice for a big-time composer (Jean Reno in one of the movie\u2019s well-chosen cameos).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe challenge for \u201cTuner,\u201d commercially at least, is that it\u2019s a little too mainstream for art-house patrons. But it likely sounds too specialized for the megaplex set, even if it\u2019s broadly appealing enough to satisfy that audience, if they\u2019d only give it the chance. There\u2019s something about Niki\u2019s profession that \u2014 though it lends itself to fun facts and poetic monologues about the impossibility of perfection \u2014 strikes folks as niche. Then again, if there\u2019s one person who can make it sound great, that would be a tuner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dustin Hoffman and Leo Woodall make quite the pair in \u201cTuner.\u201d Hoffman\u2019s character, veteran piano technician Harry Horowitz,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[26619,18,117,19,17,337,25194,13245,26620],"class_list":{"0":"post-34092","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-daniel-roher","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-telluride-film-festival","15":"tag-toronto-film-festival","16":"tag-tuner"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}