Review: ‘Tuner’ plays the crime thriller in a familiar key
2026 / Dir. Daniel Roher / 2026 Chicago Critics Film Festival
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: Emily the Criminal, piano music, that ominous feeling that you’ve gotten in over your head but can’t stop because the money’s too good.
In Tuner, the narrative feature debut of documentarian and writer-director Daniel Roher (The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band), Leo Woodall (The White Lotus, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy) plays Niki, a reserved piano tuner and former musician with a hearing disorder that makes him especially sensitive to sound. While gigging around New York City, adjusting pianos as the apprentice of an aging yet well-connected tuner (Dustin Hoffman having a ball in a small yet consequential role), Niki serves a clientele consisting mostly of rich folks whose fancy pianos are either purely ornamental or used for special occasions (“Billy Joel is performing,” says one event planner at a mansion being prepared for a fundraiser).
In a chance encounter during one job with a crew of shady criminals trying to crack a safe, Niki discovers his aural gifts also make him a great safecracker. You might be able to guess what happens next, because a story like Tuner of a talented yet down-on-their-luck striver who reluctantly enters a life of crime for the money, does well for a while and even falls in love—with a very charming Havana Rose Liu (Lurker, Bottoms) as a fellow pianist—then slides down the slippery slope of bad decisions into the consequences of their actions is a time-honored genre in movie history. Tuner very much harmonizes with other recent films in this canon like Relay and Emily the Criminal, with its clever conceit and relatively breezy mode making it easy on the eyes and ears—even if there are some recognizable refrains along the way.