Daniel Roher attends the “Tuner” Premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at Eccles Theatre on January 22, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

By Adam Silverstein

There’s a moment before the first screening of Tuner at the Eccles Theatre on opening day of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival where director Daniel Roher pauses, looks out at the packed room, and admits he might cry. “There’s a non-zero chance,” he says, voice already catching. “There’s a lot going on in the world, people.” It’s his first time at the Festival in person — his documentary Navalny premiered virtually back in 2022 — and the pride, gratitude, and sheer relief of being here lands heavily. Roher dedicates the screening to his mentor, Rob Reiner, and Reiner’s wife Michelle, sharing the advice from Reiner that’s clearly been rattling around his head throughout the making of this film: create something people want to watch.

Tuner, which premieres in the Spotlight category, is a strange, funny, and surprisingly moving left turn for Roher — his first narrative feature after a defining run in documentary. Set in New York City, the film centers on Niki (Leo Woodall), a gifted piano tuner with an extreme auditory sensitivity that makes the world feel permanently too loud. He never takes his hearing aids off — “It’s hot, right?” he jokes at one point — and the film cleverly pulls us into his experience of sound, using sharp shifts in volume and texture to make noise feel invasive, even painful.

Woodall, very much having a moment, gives Niki a wiry charm and a restless edge. He tunes pianos for the rich, the bored, and the self-absorbed — people who ask him to do the plumbing as he coaxes music back into their instruments — until a chance discovery reveals he has an uncanny ability to crack safes. It’s a skill that pulls him into a shady security operation run by Uri (a slippery, watchful Lior Raz), and suddenly Niki is navigating a world far louder, riskier, and more morally compromised than the one he started in.

Anchoring all of this is Dustin Hoffman as Harry Horowitz, a bittersweet old piano tuner and Niki’s reluctant mentor. Hoffman is flat-out hilarious here — the Eccles crowd roared at his best lines — but he also gives Harry a bruised tenderness, a sense of someone who knows exactly how small the margins are between success and obscurity. During the Q&A, Roher admits he’d never worked with actors before. “They seemed strange to me,” he says, laughing. Hoffman, it turns out, was anything but intimidating. “He treated me like this was his big break. He called me ‘sir.’ He called me ‘boss.’”

The film’s emotional center shifts when Niki begins tuning pianos for Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a sharp, searching presence who actually sees him. Their bond is tentative and intimate, and it grounds the film just as the plot begins to twist into darker territory. Tuner is funny, yes — often laugh-out-loud — but it’s also unafraid to get bleak. It’s a story about different worlds colliding, about how luck and desperation can blur into the same thing, and about how easy it is to slip into the wrong crowd when you’re just trying to survive.

The Eccles buzzed throughout the screening — gasps at the turns the story takes, bursts of laughter at Hoffman’s barbs — and when the credits rolled, the applause was loud and sustained. A killer score throbbed underneath it all, reinforcing the sense that this is, at its core, a movie about sound and the power it holds over us.

Roher speaks about being inspired by a friend of his wife’s, who is a real-life piano tuner, and about resisting the idea that his career needs to stay neatly categorized. “I don’t want to be put in a box,” he says, comparing this pivot to Bob Dylan going electric. Tuner is exactly that kind of move: risky, surprising, and alive with intent.

As applause rolled through the Eccles, it was hard not to think back to Rob Reiner’s simple advice — create something people want to watch. Between the laughter, the gasps, and the buzz that followed the credits, Tuner proves that Roher heard him loud and clear.