Mark Kermode reviews Tuner

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Now, last week on the show, Leo Wood was our guest and we were amling through some thoughts about Tuna, uh, which is the film which he stars with Dustin Hoffman. So, the interview went out last week. So, if you haven't heard that, it is worth going back to just so you get a general feel for where Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman, which are like two of the central characters uh, in this movie, how how they link up. Uh, but we couldn't review it last week because it's only out this week. So with the conversation with Leo Wood in mind, Mark, take us through tune.

[00:00:30]>> Well, as you said, he was the guest last week. I think that Leo Wood found it quite hard to describe the film. Let's see if I can do any better. Okay.

[00:00:38]>> Okay. Go ahead. Yes.

[00:00:40]>> Lowkey crime thriller from Canadian co-writer and director Daniel Rower, who made the Oscarinning Doc Nalli, which you talked about in the interview. So Leo Whittle is the tuner of the title.

[00:00:52]And just to be clear, if you're listening to this, T U N E R, not T U N A, although there is a gag about that.

[00:00:59]>> A young man named Nikki >> who had to give up a promising career as a pianist due to the fact that he suffered from hyperacusis, which is hyper sensitivity to sound. And this was not a something that I knew about beforehand, but the film does a pretty pretty good job of explaining what it means. It means that you know he's got these he has to wear these earpieces all the time in order to blank out the sound because effectively the world the world is too loud for him and as a result of it he can't he can't play the piano anymore because the piano would be too loud. So the condition has stopped him leading a normal life in inverted commas unless he wears ear protectors all the time. But it has made him an extremely good piano tuner and as it happens a deaf safe cracker because he can hear the tumblers in and certainly an old-fashioned safe. He can hear them falling. This trick is very useful particularly for Nikki's mentor.

[00:01:55]And I mean Dustin Hoffman is effectively as a father figure, isn't he? Um his memory is failing. He forgets the combination to his safe. Nikki can open it. He can listen to the clicks. This also attracts the attention of Yuri, who is the leader of a gang of thieves who sees Nikki's safe cracking in action and goes, "We need that guy." And at first Nikki isn't interested, but when Dustin Hoffman's character Harry falls ill, he needs money. And so this side hustle, cracking safes, proves useful. The film also stars Havana Rose Leu who we mentioned before who's in power ballad as Ruthie who is herself a talented pianist looking for a place as an assistant to a celebrated composer played by Jean Renault with whom Harry wants him to hook up. Anyway, here's a clip.

[00:02:45]>> Hi, nice to see you again.

[00:02:48]>> Hey, introduce me. I don't know her name.

[00:02:54]>> I'm Ruthie.

[00:02:55]>> Hello, Ruthie. I'm Harry Horowitz. You can call me Harry. You still call me late for dinner. But I'm pumped.

[00:03:01]>> Steal that line from my grandmother.

[00:03:03]>> No, I never stole anything in my life.

[00:03:05]This is Nikki. He is my tuning apprentice. He's more like my nephew, though we're not related. And I'll tell you one thing, he is very eligible, but he has a hearing condition as you can see from his plugs, which are not hearing aids. Although that's a common mistake. He's not being rude. It's doctor's orders. And did I mention he is very eligible? Harry, please stop.

[00:03:27]>> So last week, if you remember, we did one frame back and we did films about people with special sets of skills and somebody came up with the Harvey Kitel uh film Fingers. So Tuna actually does have a I hadn't seen Tuna at that point.

[00:03:40]Tuna does have a a thematic connection with Fingers. Fingers is a 1978 James Tobac film about a young pianist who is torn between music and crime and family ties. And also with the Jacqu Odia film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which is a French effectively a French language remake of Fingers. The film does, Tuna does have a very ' 70s feel about it in that basically it's a character drama that happens to be playing out within the framework of a crime thriller. The plot is very twisty. I mean, overly so in my opinion, particularly in the third act, in which the coincidences come very, very thick and fast. But it's also functional because the crime narrative is really a device for allowing us to to ex experience the world as rather than being seen as heard by its central character but who has oversensitized hearing and therefore it's putting you in his position and saying this is what this world seems like to him. I think in the interview Leo Woodall said, you know, the world it's just too loud and it can seem like there's just too much of it. And then you crank that up with this crime thriller narrative in which there genuinely is too much of everything. It was interesting that Leo Wood did find it difficult to talk about the movie, but because there is none of that hesitancy in his performance. In his performance, he completely seems to embody the character.

[00:05:02]>> He's absolutely convincing as a piano tuner and a safe cracker. I mean, I wasn't completely convinced by him as a piano player, but no, that's okay because that's a lesser part of the plot.

[00:05:14]>> Havana Rose Leu certainly I was watching her thinking, "Wow, you really are good."

[00:05:20]>> She really genuinely seems to be to to be doing that, isn't she? So, um, it was I think the fact is that the reason the reason that it works is that in that '7s way, it's really a character drama that's just posing as a crime thriller.

[00:05:38]It's It's funny that that clip we played was pretty incidental. It was just Dustin Hoffman saying, "Oh, yeah, this is my thing. He's going to buy my nephew blah blah blah blah blah." And what's interesting is that you just you buy into the characters. I'm sure that Dustin Hoffman absolutely loves doing that sort of stuff. It also helps that you have sound designer Johnny Burn and you talked about this before. Johnny Burn's credits include Zone of Interest.

[00:06:03]He's worked with Yos Lanthamos. He's a genius and like Darius Mard's sound of metal which had a different sound designer but again was very much about the the way in which the world is evoked through the sound design. This creates an audio world that you live in because the way the sound design works is that it takes you with inside the head of the central character. We really do hear the world through Nikki's ears. I do think the the third act descends somewhat into contrivance and melodrama, but there is enough about the characters that rings true that means that even when you get the overpowering clanking gears of the plot, I don't know whether you agree with me about this, but I think in the third act, there is altogether too much plot, but what what it doesn't ever do is overwhelm the grace notes of the performances because in the end, what you're really interested in is the characters and the characters are established well enough and their world is established well enough that you you're interested in them less so than the crime mechanics of the plot which literally seem to be there to just drive the thing along.