Tuner Review: Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman Play a Perfect Duet in Most Charming Crime Thriller of 2026

Add ARY News on Google AAResize Some films announce themselves with noise. Tuner, Daniel Roher’s quietly assured debut as a narrative filmmaker, does the opposite — it arrives in hushed, careful tones, then slowly turns up the volume until you realise you’ve been completely seduced.

At the heart of it is Leo Woodall, the White Lotus breakout who has been waiting for a vehicle that matches his considerable gifts. He’s found it. Playing Niki White, a former piano prodigy now working as a piano tuner in New York City, Woodall commands the screen with a coiled, soulful intensity that feels born for the noir genre. Niki has hyperacusis — a condition that makes sound agonisingly amplified — which cost him his performing career but sharpened his hearing to near-superhuman levels. He moves through the city wearing earplugs, hyper-attuned to the world yet cut off from it, which makes him both the most observant person in any room and the most isolated. It’s a rich character conception, and Woodall inhabits it fully.

Niki works as apprentice to Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), a veteran piano technician whose rumpled wisdom and bone-deep love of craft make him the film’s warm, beating heart. Hoffman — in what plays like a jubilant late-career gift — is flat-out wonderful here. He is irascible and tender in equal measure, lacing his lines with deadpan humour while hinting at a man who knows how razor-thin the margins are between a life well-lived and one merely endured. Together, Woodall and Hoffman form a mentor-mentee bond that feels genuinely earned: the silences between them carry as much weight as the dialogue.