In a city where everyone’s always rushing, the one guy who’s forced to listen — really listen — is the last person you’d expect to get pulled into a crime story. And yet, that’s the trapdoor premise under Daniel Roher’s first narrative feature, “Tuner.”
Starring Leo Woodall, Dustin Hoffman, Havana Rose Liu, Jean Reno, Lior Raz, and Tovah Feldshuh, Black Bear Pictures has released the “Tuner” trailer ahead of its U.S. rollout: a limited release on May 22, 2026, followed by an expansion on May 29.
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Woodall plays Niki White, a gifted former pianist who stops performing after developing hyperacusis, a rare hearing disorder that can make everyday sounds feel unbearably loud and even painful. He’s now a piano tuner working across New York, apprenticed to Hoffman’s old-pro mentor, Harry Horowitz — a relationship that suggests craft, routine, and a kind of quiet intimacy between two people who know what it means to live by the ear.
But the film’s twist is pure genre mischief: Niki’s meticulous, near-surgical sensitivity to sound and precision doesn’t just translate to Steinways — it maps onto locks. Criminals take notice, and what starts as “making ends meet” work curdles into safecracking jobs that threaten to swallow the life he’s trying to rebuild, including a connection with Liu’s Ruthie, a composition student who complicates the math of risk.
Roher — the Academy Award-winning documentarian behind “Navalny” — is essentially importing his feel for mounting pressure into a romance-tinged heist framework, where the central “superpower” is also a liability. And this isn’t an unknown quantity: the film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2025, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2025, and will play the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
“Tuner” will open in limited theaters May 22, 2026, and expand May 29. Watch the first trailer below.
