Tuner, Daniel Roher’s debut fictional film, continues the traditions of both Michael Mann and Paul Schrader, by revolving around a lone worker who is gradually drawn into the criminal underworld. It’s especially redolent of Schrader’s night worker films (and Schrader himself lauded it on Letterboxd) although much of it occurs during the day, and it eventually builds to a considerably more optimistic vision of the world than Schrader’s melancholy nocturnes. Leo Woodall plays Niki White, a piano prodigy who has been forced to give up his craft after developing hyperacusis, a heightened sensitivity to noise that requires him to always wear protective earwear. However, this condition has also allowed Niki to divert his exquisite musical skills into another venture, tuning pianos, with the assistance of his mentor Harry Horowitz, played by Dustin Hoffman. Upon interrupting a trio of thieves at a client’s home, Niki is somewhat unwillingly drawn into the world of safecracking, where he excels due to the same auditory skills that permit him to tune pianos. However, the tension between tuning and safecracking starts to escalate after Harry abruptly dies and Niki becomes involves with Ruthie Waymon, a piano prodigy played by Havana Rose Liu, who is preparing to apply for a placement with maestro Marius Maissnes, played by Jean Reno.  

From the outset Tuner is driven by a fascination with the tension between the material and the immaterial. Niki’s hyperacusis means that he can’t escape his body and that the urban noise of New York is oppressively physical unless it is muffled through his protective head gear. Even apparent silence is contoured by micro-acoustic touches, while music itself takes on a remarkable materiality; indeed, Niki transforms tuning pianos into a form of aleatory music akin to LaMonte Young’s Compositions 1960, which envisaged music as a physical maniupulation of the instrument rather than conventional melody or rhythm. Likewise, Niki transforms safes into musical instruments, such that each safecracking becomes a recital, a testament to his ongoing attunement to the world of sound. There’s a touch here of John Cage’s insistence that every sound is music and that genuine silence doesn’t really exist. However, this persistent materiality sits alongside a more diffuse digital world, for the point of the safecracking enterprise is ultimately to gain access to a BitCoin code. In one of the most visceral and dramatic scenes, Niki cracks two safes to find this code and then, when the heist goes south, is forced to eat the paper it is written on, as the virtual realm is absorbed back into the corporeal, and body and digitality come together in one tableau.  

This tension between materiality and digitality has been a part of cinema for some time but Niki’s peculiar isolation, and his subsistence on the rituals of work, aligns Tuner with what might be described as the post-pandemic fascination with craft – films like Perfect Days, The Taste of Things and The Brutalist that affirm manual artistic labour as a way of overcoming solitude. The latter days of the pandemic spawned a fascination with vinyl records, analog watches, traditional photography and a whole culture of manual repair that plays out in Tuner’s fascination with the interiority and legibility of the piano – both its general structure and the idiosyncratic differences from instrument to instrument. The fact that this is not a pandemic period piece, and that Niki remains isolated within a bustling New York, segues this post-pandemic outlook into a more contemporary engagement with AI, which is excellent at what Aristotle described as techne (technical wisdom) and episteme (theoretical wisdom) but not so much with phronesis, or practical wisdom. Between piano tuning and safe cracking, Tuner becomes a case study for what types of labour and experience we still consider to be distinctively human, and for those types of knowledge that are embedded in the body and more difficult to formulate in propositional terms.  

Key to this outlook is the idea of friction – the digital world of the pandemic and the contemporary world of AI are eerie in their frictionless sheen, in the same way drone shots can become slightly nauseating when divorced of the human contingencies of an older kind of bravura tracking-shot. Just as Roher pores over the idiosyncrasies of each piano, the film repeatedly emphasizes the uniqueness of each safe; in fact safecracking, like piano tuning, is literally about reading the exact degree of friction needed for harmony. Niki builds his skills in both areas precisely because he moves through a world that doesn’t instantly yield to his needs, and so it feels right that the baseline of his skill set is a human frailty, or even disability, in the form of his hyperacusis. For those reasons, Tuner is keenly interested in the idea of apprenticeship as a testament to knowledge that is transmitted through bodies rather than through clouds of data. While the film’s emotional core nominally revolves around Niki and Ruthie’s romance, the most vital relationships are between mentors and apprentices. Niki’s two most devastating moments come when Harry dies and when his safecracking inadvertently compromises Ruthie’s relationship with maestro Marius, and in the closing scene Ruthie chooses Marius over Niki, puts apprenticeship over romance. 

Tuner thus asks how the world of AI-inflected professionalism would look if we were to return to the model of craft guilds and practical traditions – and this contours how it reimagines the heist as a genre. Ever since Steven Soderbergh reinvented the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, heists have become steadily more digital, typically imagining success in terms of technological brinksmanship; whoever has the best device, or the best hack, wins. In Tuner, the heist retreats from this model of techno-ingenuity to become an affirmation of embodied expertise – hand, ear and mechanism over algorithim, storage and interface. More pointedly, the heist becomes a tribute to embodied duration, to time lived and felt at a bodily level, to attention itself as a precious asset in developing a long con. Hence the film’s fascination with watches, which, like safes, act as surrogates for the piano, and frame the piano as an object latent with duration. We rotate through several watches throughout the film but one resonates in particular: Niki retrieves it from a safe, then gives it to Ruthie, who wears it to her interview with Marius, who recognises as his own property, and finally identifies it as an inheritance from a member of his family who was a Holocaust survivor. This watch, which becomes the pivotal plot point of the film, encapsulates Tuner’s thesis on material labour: it brings us into contacts with objects that absorb time, accumulate time and endure over time, thereby acting as a bulwark against the frictionless non-time of AI.  

The motif of the watch, and the way it shapes Niki and Ruthie’s relationship in the ambiguous final scene, makes it clear that Tuner is not merely nostalgic for analog technology. Instead, it carves out a post-digital aesthetic that is contoured both by the pandemic and by AI, and that asks us to cultivate forms of embodied care that testify to lived experience, while treating cinema’s special powers of duration as a potent vehicle for this project. For this is a tactile film, attuned to the tactility of a small-scale New York chamber cinephilia whose venues have vanished rapidly over the last few years, venues where you are as acutely aware of the physical presences of the other audience members as Niki is of the world around him – sometimes oppressively aware. Something mystical accumulates from sustained exposure to that kind of cinephilia, and what finally links Roher to Schrader is his drive to rehabilitate mystery – not, admittedly, in the transcendental vein of Schrader but in terms of the irreducible complexity of embodied engagement with idiosyncratic and imperfect physical objects, whether they are safes, pianos or the wonky cinema seats of an older kind of small-scale venue. These imperfections constitute Tuner’s reimagination of Walter Benjamin’s aura, especially when they accumulate over time, as the impediments of the material world, which once seemed to be the main thing isolating us from other people, now turn into the tools we might use to find our way back to them.