Vague Visages’ Tuner review contains minor spoilers. Daniel Roher’s 2025 movie features Leo Woodall, Dustin Hoffman and Alisen Richmond-Peck. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

It might be damning with faint praise to say that the best thing about Tuner — the narrative debut of Oscar-winning documentarian Daniel Roher — is the way it sounds, but the piercing, abrasive soundscape heard from the perspective of the hearing-impaired Niki White (Leo Woodall) is the sole novelty of the generic New York crime story. Sound designer Johnnie Burn, a frequent Jonathan Glazer collaborator responsible for the ambient sounds of death eternally looming in the background of The Zone of Interest (2023), rises to the challenge of fleshing out the world as heard by a man with hyperacusis — an increased sensitivity of sound which forces him to wear noise-cancelling headphones at all times. As the predictable story forces Niki further into the criminal underworld, the sounds made by weapons used against him become more of a force of violence than the weapons themselves. Every movement is designed to pummel the audience with discordant noise.

The incredible post-production work struggles to elevate a formulaic screenplay, where highly specific quirks don’t hold the characters back from becoming played-out archetypes in several other ways. Niki was a piano prodigy, and still has a gift for tuning pianos, working as the apprentice for Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), whose business goes door-to-door, largely working with super-rich clients who don’t even use the instruments they have on display as status symbols. While working overnight at a client’s home, the protagonist gets interrupted by drilling sounds upstairs, and discovers a private security team (hired by the same client) is trying to break into the safe, so Niki decides to show off his piano tuning talents during the heist. After Harry suffers a heart attack, Woodall’s character reluctantly accepts an offer for more safe-cracking jobs to pay his medical bills, and uses the rest of the money to treat his new pianist girlfriend, Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu).

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Niki is the kind of brooding, monosyllabic, in-over-his-head man that’s been played with greater distinction in numerous gritty crime movies from the 1970s that Roher desperately attempts to emulate. The character’s disability informs the social withdrawal of his adult life, as he’s reluctant to make connections because of that disconnect from the way others experience the world, but Woodall’s performance never seems to reflect this reading. The actor approaches Niki as a borderline antihero figure, and he decompartmentalizes any of the more intriguing factors shaping the character’s lived experience. Niki’s hyperacusis is only relevant to the plot when used against him, thus making Roher and Robert Ramsey’s screenplay feel like it approaches the disability as a mere gimmick — a rare condition that adds an enticing plot hook where there otherwise wouldn’t be one.

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Nothing about the writing nor the portrayal of living with hyperacusis feels like it has been researched or approached with sensitivity. It’s an excuse to overwhelm the audience with a sensory overload whenever action is heard from the protagonist’s perspective (which works in those scenes), but it underlines just how shallow Tuner is when it comes to depicting living with a disability elsewhere. That Niki still winds up as one of the more fascinating characters is a sign that even though he is one-note, there’s still a lot more for Woodall to work with than any of the supporting cast. Liu’s love interest character seems to exist purely to add greater moral weight to the protagonist’s decision to continue with his secret safe-cracking job, while Uri (Lior Raz), the leader of the criminal operation, is among the most generic depictions of an underworld boss that one could possibly write. His organization is Israeli but could have easily been Russian, Italian or any other number of nationalities Hollywood uses as a problematic shorthand for criminals.

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Tuner is the rare American film with Israeli villains, which should feel noteworthy, arriving at a time when global support for the country continues to reach record lows. But any cultural identity is absent from the page, with their nationality not even explicitly stated once. This suggests that the villains are blank slates, only given anything resembling a backstory after performers were cast. It’s not the actors’ faults that they can’t impart any unique identity onto such flimsy material, although they are dealt a further blow when appearing next to Hoffman, who relishes his first major supporting showcase in years and makes a meal out of the few breadcrumbs of characterization. The Oscar-winning actor makes his fellow cast members look like they’re phoning it in, and everybody looks worse because of the extent to which Hoffman makes the assignment look easy.

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The most damning thing about Tuner is that it feels like a very deliberate attempt to make a festival-friendly “calling card” movie, designed with the intention of getting the director on the radar of producers needing flesh blood for their franchises, as Roher shows some creative spark but not enough to suggest that studio orders won’t be followed. Those few minutes of ingenuity don’t compensate for an otherwise hollow, by-the-numbers crime movie made with a draining lack of passion by all involved.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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