Most credible critics recommend Tuner, a new movie written by Daniel Roher and Robert Ramsey, which surprises me.
Niki (Leo Woodall), who has hyperacusis and no longer plays piano, works as a piano tuner with his father’s friend Harry (Dustin Hoffman). On a job, he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a piano student whose dream is apprenticing for a famous maestro (Jean Reno). They meet a second time with Harry, who is soon hospitalized and then dies, leaving behind big medical bills.
To pay these, Niki uses his hypersensitive hearing to help criminals crack safes, and later gives Ruthie a stolen watch, which is a replacement for the one from her grandmother that she left on a train. She wears this watch to her audition, and learns in conversation with the maestro that it has been stolen, which ends her relationship with Niki. Niki manages to restore her reputation with the maestro, and his own with her.
This movie, which is directed by Roher, intriguingly mixes genre conventions and offers lavish visuals and appealing performances, especially from Woodall and Hoffman. These however cannot compensate for its specious plot, which overshadows everything else.
This story is filled with implausible circumstances. Niki for example memorizes cryptocurrency account recovery codes despite being ordered at gunpoint to destroy and then consume the document, and later reconstructs these codes to access the account, but he neither steals this money nor offers this information even after he is kidnapped to obtain these codes, which forces him to miss Ruthie’s audition performance.
These circumstances also appear at the center of the story. For instance, the maestro recognizes the watch he had stolen from him on Ruthie’s arm in his discussion with her about the apprenticeship, and agrees to avoid the authorities, and apparently still offer Ruthie the apprenticeship, after Niki offers to obtain the second stolen one — both had been secured by the maestro’s grandparents before they departed for a concentration camp — from his co-criminals who are apprehensive about keeping stolen goods from Holocaust victims.
This pattern is only reinforced by the conclusion. Niki, who has lost his hearing from a beating after he was caught by his co-criminals while retrieving the second stolen watch, is nonetheless asked by the maestro to tune his piano, but Niki first plays it, and demonstrates both his proficiency and credibility, for his ex-girlfriend, who is moved by the moment.
Such situations stretch the suspension of disbelief past the point of breaking at least for some. Those who can overlook all these coincidences will have an entertaining experience. The rest might realize that Niki, who tells Harry early in the movie he’ll never getting back the time he spent trying to understand Harry’s joke, was more right than they realized.