People don’t all experience sound the same way, and what feels like a perfectly pleasant musical note to some may be ear-piercing to someone who is better trained. In what may be the first crime film to feature a piano tuner as its protagonist, a skilled young man with perfect pitch who spends his days ensuring that pianos are performing to their full capabilities realizes that his experience brings with it another skill, one with a potential to make untold cash but also with the promise of likely trouble. As with any such setup, it’s fun while it lasts until the consequences of lawlessness and overconfidence begin to take their toll.
Niki (Leo Woodall) works closely with Henry (Dustin Hoffman), a dear friend who, according to his wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), hasn’t raised his prices in years. Henry’s waning memory leads to his changing the code to his safe and forgetting it, and some quick research on Niki’s part shows that his sharp ear also enables him to listen closely and crack safes. When he walks in on an attempted robbery while tuning a piano, Niki chooses to show what he can do, opening up a world of easy criminal activity with a major payout that can help make a dent in Henry’s mounting hospital bills.
This film marks Daniel Roher’s first narrative feature, quite a shift from the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny. But it’s closer to his most recent project, Blink, which looked at the loss of vision and how it affected children. Niki wears what look like hearing aids at all times, with over-the-ear headphones to put on if things get too out of hand since he’s allergic to loud noises, as he puts it. His work requires focus and even though he can no longer play the piano, he still spends most of his time in the company of the instrument, using his perfect pitch to help him. He’s a dedicated worker, which helps since his new occupation is considerably more high-stakes and high-risk.
This film feels like a comedy in its initial scenes thanks to Hoffman’s repeated joke-cracking, and even after Niki begins meeting the crew run by Uri (Lior Raz) for regular jobs, it’s still light. His budding romance with music student Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), who initially isn’t fond of him but gradually sees the appeal, is a nice, idealistic counterpoint to the criminal activity in which he’s regularly engaging, which seems innocuous enough at first but quickly gets more serious as successive jobs become more dangerous. By its third act, this film is a dark thriller, upping the intensity and shifting from a hopeful film about finding happiness to something far less optimistic.
Woodall, a familiar TV face from The White Lotus and One Day who also appears in another film at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, Nuremberg, delivers a quiet performance as Niki that’s very effective, particularly when he does decide to speak and indicates a subdued passion for the work he does. Liu is a wonderful addition as always and makes Ruthie so much more than just a romantic interest. Hoffman and Raz are both doing their own thing, playing the comedic mentor and the more threatening enforcer, respectively, roles that they’ve done before and which work well for them in this context. While the story does largely follow an expected course, there’s enough flavor throughout to make it feel distinctive and occasionally surprising. Though its denouement proves less satisfying and bleaker than might have been indicated early on in the film, it boasts enough cleverness and spunk to make its unusual premise appealing and effective.
Movie Rating: 7/10
