We’re aware that movie action heroes tend to have ‘very particular’ sets of skills, but we never expected to be watching a trailer for a film in which the lead character - one who gets drawn into the murky world of organised crime - is… a piano tuner.
Tuner is that film, though. It stars rising (risen?) British actor Leo Woodall as Niki White, a young piano tuner who’s mentored by Harry Horowitz, played by Hollywood legend Dustin Hoffman.
It turns out that Niki has a hearing condition that not only makes him good at tuning pianos, but also identifying chords and intervals. He appears to be some kind of music theory savant with perfect pitch, but also suffers from hyperacusis, which makes him “allergic to loud noises” and may have been the reason why his virtuoso playing career was curtailed.
But is there a danger that nefarious thieves could exploit Niki and his talent and make him use it to do bad things? It seems that there is, because - according to the film’s blurb - the young man’s “heightened sense of hearing draws the attention of criminals, who see his talents as useful for opening safes as for tuning Steinways.”
Why would innocent young Niki do such a thing, though? Well, the trailer indicates that the motivation for his inevitable turn to the dark side is a need to pay an ailing Harry’s medical bills.
To make matters worse, it looks like he ends up dragging composition student Ruthie (played by Havana Rose Liu) into his increasingly fraught double life, putting her in danger, too. “I’m just a piano tuner, man” he says at one point, presumably as he’s starting to realise that he’s in way over his head.
It might sound like a preposterous pitch but, given the high quality of the cast and the fact that it’s co-written and directed by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Daniel Roher, Tuner might just be a perfect one.
Explaining his decision to make the piano the focus of the movie to Deadline Hollywood, Roher said: "The piano is an infinite universe of possibility. I wanted to write a film that put as much emphasis on the sound and the auditory experience as the images and the visuals."
Early reviews have been promising, but we’ll have to wait until May, when the film is released, to make a judgement of our own.
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