Sundance 2026 Review: TUNER, Star-Driven Crime-Thriller Hampered by Predictable Plotting

After winning an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2022 for Navalny, filmmaker Daniel Roher (Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band) shifted his focus from the documentary format (Blink) to narrative storytelling with Tuner, an engrossing, if uneven, crime-thriller, co-starring Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman in a pivotal role as an aging, past-his-prime, NYC-based piano tuner and Leo Woodall as his only protege and the heir apparent to his man-in-a-van business. 

 

Closely inspired by Michael Mann’s Thief and Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, Tuner centers on Niki (a standout turn from The White Lotus alum Woodall), a onetime child prodigy-turned-tuner equipped and/or burdened with a unique skillset. Blessed and/or gifted with not only perfect pitch, but an extreme sensitivity to sound bordering on the pathological (if not the psychological), Niki wears special earplugs to muffle the constant ambient noise from the outside world. When Niki’s high-end earplugs aren’t sufficient to dampen an otherwise intolerable decibel count, he covers his ears with noise-canceling headphones. 

 

Niki’s affliction limits his interactions to Henry Horowitz (Hoffman, underused), his mentor, employer, and friend; Henry’s wife, Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), and the occasional, usually wealthy NY client with an overpriced, underused piano at their disposal. Otherwise, Niki plods along, preferring a life half-lived with minimal intrusions, distractions, or diversions.

 

It’s not so much a directionless life as one without purpose. For Niki, his yesterday, today, and tomorrow merge —  and melt — into one indistinguishable, ever-flowing present with minimal risk and minimal reward. 

 

Discovering his super-hearing allows him to unlock supposedly impregnable safes, first when Henry leaves his hearing aids in his home safe, later when Niki, wholly immersed in tuning a piano for an upcoming charity event, discovers an Israeli-born security consultant, Uri (Lior Raz), breaking into a wealthy family’s safe. Without giving thought to the consequences, Niki helps Uri open the safe, less as an opportunity to crab extra untaxed cash and more as a personal challenge, an opportunity to flex his newfound skills under a time-sensitive deadline. 

 

Lior justifies his criminality to Niki by pointing out that he only steals just enough from his wealthy clients to gradually enrich himself, but never too much to be noticed by his clients, and thus, have his illegality uncovered. Aided by his ineffectual underlings, Benny (Nissan Sakira) and Yoni (Gil Cohen), Lior has created a profitable side business. The addition of Niki’s unique toolset to his team promises even greater windfalls for everyone, albeit always with the risk of being caught, prosecuted, and imprisoned.

 

As pure of heart as Lior’s isn’t, the oddly naive, sweetly innocent Niki – a narrative conceit that unfortunately fails cursory scrutiny — sees his new partnership as a means towards an end: Help him buy out Henry’s business and, given Henry’s failing health and mounting medical debts, prevent Henry and Marla from losing everything and living their remaining days in abject poverty. It separates Niki, motivated by altruism and compassion, and Lior, motivated purely by self-interest, on opposite sides of the same moral coin.

 

Working from a script cowritten with veteran screenwriter Robert Ramsey (Man of the House, Intolerable Cruelty, Life), Roher takes Niki through the proverbial day and/or night of the soul, exposing him not just to varying levels of criminality, but to depravity, too, threatening, as expected given the sometimes painfully predictable plotting employed here, his life, Henry and Marla’s uncertain future, and later, his burgeoning relationship with a conservatory student and aspiring composer, Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), who gives Niki a chance to reengage with the rarefied music-centered life he left behind when his affliction presented itself and ended his future as a pianist. 

 

Despite skillful camerawork, editing, and suitably tense pacing, especially when a newly criminal Niki finds himself on the clock, unlocking one safe after another, inching ever closer to detection and danger, Tuner never escapes the aforementioned predictable plotting. Roher and his co-screenwriter, Robert Ramsey, never stray, not even once, from tried-and-true genre tropes.

 

Niki’s partnership of convenience with the hotheaded Lior points in one and only one direction, conflict, while Niki’s romance with Ruthie, built in part on a lie (his second, criminal life), resolves itself exactly as — and when — expected. Only a last-minute finale, ambiguous in intent yet graceful in execution, elevates Tuner beyond its otherwise derivative and recycled storytelling beats. 

 

Tuner premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.