Tuner review | Good vibrations

tuner duston hoffman and leo woodall stood in a doorway

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Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman star in a sweet crime caper with a toe-tapping jazz soundtrack. Here’s our Tuner review. Tuner – the new crime rom-com from, implausibly, Navalny director Daniel Roher – is a lot like Baby Driver. I mean, it’s a lot like Baby Driver. There’s the premise, of a young man with ... Tuner review | Good vibrations

Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman star in a sweet crime caper with a toe-tapping jazz soundtrack. Here’s our Tuner review.

Tuner – the new crime rom-com from, implausibly, Navalny director Daniel Roher – is a lot like Baby Driver. I mean, it’s a lot like Baby Driver. There’s the premise, of a young man with a hearing condition recruited against his will to help a criminal gang. There’s the tone, a sweet, meet-cute romance where music plays a pivotal role. There’s the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Unsquare Dance over the opening credits.

When watching it though, I urge you to try, as hard as you possibly can, not to think about Baby Driver. Because despite plenty of surface level similarities, Tuner is better than a riff on the Edgar Wright film.

It’s the kind of light, original premise movie we’ve been crying out for – a pitch-perfect star-maker for Leo Woodall (One Day, Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy) and Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms), with Dustin Hoffman at his charming-old-man best. It’s the kind of film that’ll have you skipping out the cinema, and while I wish with every fibre of my being that Roher had distinguished his film a little more by not inexplicably borrowing two songs from the Baby Driver soundtrack (such a coincidence that I have to conclude no one involved in the production had seen it) it’s surely near-impossible to come out of Tuner without a smile on your face.

Right, that’s the last time I’ll mention Baby Driver, I promise.

The plot: Woodall plays Niki, a former musical wunderkind now suffering from hyperacusis – he’s “allergic to loud noises”, the film explains. Unable to play the piano, he spends his days tuning them with an old friend of his dad’s (Hoffman), making use of his perfect pitch and acute sense of hearing to fix instruments destined to become un-played vanity decorations in the richest postcodes in New York.

One such job bumps him against a gang opening a safe with a power drill; thanks to his audiological superpowers, Niki has an easier way, one money troubles compel him to demonstrate again and again. At the same time, he meets the ambitious music student, Ruthie (Rose Liu), and the two fall into a relationship. Will his new criminal dealings collide with his true love with unforeseeable consequences? You’ll bet they will.

Yet if Tuner is at all predictable, it’s only because it’s a “well-made box” movie – the kind where every exquisitely-crafted part fits together with a satisfying click. The script (by Roher with Robert Ramsey) is packed with set-up and pay-off that manages to feel effortless and tightly paced at the same time; Maximilian Behrens’ sound design (The Zone Of Interest) pulls focus in moments of genuinely painful brilliance (you’ll never use an air horn at a sports game again).

But it’s the performances which elevate Tuner most of all, Woodall and Rose Liu letting sparks fly with a very specific kind of chemistry. Theirs is a surprisingly authentic relationship, one that avoids the cinematic cliché of collapsing time into plot-friendly chunks. They get on, clearly, but both worry if things might be moving too fast; grand, romantic gestures might be too much, too soon; things aren’t always as easy, or as simple, as we’ve come to expect, even from two people clearly destined to be together.

Tuner is fun, funny, and properly cosy; if you’re looking for an ideal date night movie, you’ve found it.