Tuner: Preview Club Wrap-Up

by JBFC Film Programmer Ian LoCascio

As part of the JBFC Preview Club, subscribers get an exclusive first look at the most interesting new indies and foreign films on our “New Releases” horizon. Every month, JBFC programmers present a special “secret” screening of an anticipated new film release before it is available to the public. After the screening, our programmers open the floor for a robust audience discussion and send Club members a wrap-up note with behind-the-scenes details and fun facts about the film they just watched.

As a special treat, we have decided to make these notes public. Beware, there may be spoilers!

Preview Club Wrap-up for Tuner, presented by JBFC Film Programmer Ian LoCascio on Tuesday, May 5, 2026:

Thank you for a wonderful May edition of Preview Club, which was, incredibly, our penultimate screening of the season.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, I’m excited to share that I will be returning as host for our next season of Preview Club, which is right around the corner. Tickets will go on sale soon. I encourage you to check whether your premium level membership is current, so you can buy tickets during the priority purchase period!

This month’s Preview Club film was Tuner, which will open May 29, courtesy of our friends at Black Bear Pictures.

Tuner had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last September before screening at the Toronto and Sundance International Film Festivals. The film was directed by Daniel Roher, and stars newcomers Leo Woodall and Havana Rose Liu alongside industry veterans Dustin Hoffman, Tovah Feldshuh, and Jean Reno.

Leo Woodall, who plays the film’s protagonist, Niki, is an English actor who had a breakthrough role in the second season of The White Lotus, and has since appeared in the film Nuremberg and the television series One Day. His next on-screen appearance will be in director Matt Johnson’s film Tony, about the early life of Anthony Bourdain, which we plan to open in August. Havana Rose Liu, who plays Niki’s love interest Ruthie, has appeared in films like Bottoms and Lurker—each of which played here at the Burns—and she’ll appear next in the new John Carney film Power Ballad, which we’ll open at the beginning of June.

Tuner’s director Daniel Roher made his filmmaking debut with the 2019 documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, before going on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2023 for his second film, Navalny, which centered on the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Beyond the incredible access that Roher had to Navalny, one of the things that really stuck out to me about the documentary was how Roher was able to tell Navalny’s story with such empathy and humanity, while also making it as visceral and captivating as a Hollywood espionage thriller.

So, upon learning that Roher was planning to follow up Navalny with a narrative crime thriller, I can’t say that I was terribly surprised; Tuner is a film which I think plays to his particular strengths as a filmmaker. This is Roher’s first time directing a narrative film, and he’s talked about having a lunch meeting with Robbie Robertson before the great musician passed away in 2023, where Robertson told him: “Enough of this documentary stuff. You’ve got to go find a script that you can really sink your teeth into.”

Roher has spoken about how his experience directing documentaries provided him with foundational skills and experience that carried over as he set out to direct Tuner; from his thoughtful use of music—something which had been especially vital in his documentary about Robbie Robertson—to the dynamic style of editing that made Navalny so thrilling. Still, as Roher has discussed, there are some notable differences between making a documentary and making a narrative film—one of which comes from the question of how a movie should end.

When writing a narrative screenplay, it’s conceivable that a filmmaker could know how a film is going to end before they’ve written anything else; in making a documentary, the filmmaker often has to actively search for the end of their film. The question of where or when to end a documentary rarely has a neat or obvious answer. Roher has described the process of making a documentary as one in which “you shoot the movie, and then you write it,” and “you’re writing the film while you’re editing it,” as opposed to, when making a fiction film, “you write the film, and then you shoot it.” I do think that Tuner has an especially strong ending and, although Roher has conceded that narrative filmmaking has its own share of challenges and complexities, he has said that he appreciated the “luxury” of entering production knowing how his film was going to end.

When Tuner screened at Sundance this past January, Daniel Roher dedicated the screening to Rob and Michelle Reiner, who had been tragically killed a month prior. Rob Reiner had served as an inspiration and eventual mentor for Roher as he worked on Tuner, and I think that Reiner’s influence is especially noticeable in the way that Tuner manages to blend and juggle its different tones, something Reiner was especially gifted at doing. Following Reiner’s death late last year, I spent the holidays rewatching his early work and, as I mentioned on Tuesday, it never ceases to amaze me that someone could go from directing one of the all-time great romantic comedies with When Harry Met Sally in 1989, and then, one year later, go on to direct one of the all-time great thrillers with Misery in 1990.

Though I don’t think the gangsters in Tuner are anywhere near as terrifying as Kathy Bates’ Academy Award-winning performance in Misery, and don’t think that Niki and Ruthie match the romantic heights of Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally (but who can?!), I do think the film is impressively deft at bouncing between the romance of Niki’s blossoming relationship with Ruthie and the thrills of his blossoming side-hustle as a safe cracker.

Daniel Roher has said that one of the most meaningful notes Rob Reiner gave him for Tuner was to lean into the musicality and propulsive nature of the film’s score. The film’s non-diegetic music was composed by Will Bates in collaboration with Marius de Vries, who composed the diegetic music (what’s played within the world of the film). It also features excellent needle drops of songs by such icons as Dean Martin and Nina Simone.

Beyond the music, I do think that one of the strongest elements of Tuner is its use of sound. The man behind its soundscape is a British sound designer named Johnnie Burn, who I think is among the most exciting sound designers working today. Last year alone, in addition to Tuner, Burn did the sound design for Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia (having worked with Lanthimos on all of his films since 2015’s The Lobster), and Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later—each of which played at the Burns. In addition to those films and filmmakers, Burn worked with Academy Award winner Jordan Peele on 2022’s Nope and Academy Award winner Jonathan Glazer on 2004’s Birth, 2013’s Under the Skin, and 2023’s The Zone of Interest. For the latter, Johnnie Burn received a much-deserved Academy Award for Best Sound Design.

The word most often used to describe Johnnie Burn’s audio work, from The Zone of Interest and Hamnet to Tuner, has been “immersive,” and Burn has talked about how his work is guided by a core philosophy that “sound reaches the audience before thought does.”

I think that that is true with any film, but it’s especially true for Tuner, as its protagonist, Niki, lives with hyperacusis and is especially sensitive to sound. I think that Burn does a remarkable job of immersing the viewer in the sounds of Niki’s world, and part of this comes from the ways that the film’s soundscape captures Niki’s attempts to drown out or subdue the noise around him.

The soundscape of Tuner isn’t nearly as nightmarish as in The Zone of Interest, and they are two very different films with very different narrative contexts, but I do think there’s a fundamental similarity to the ways in which you hear the sounds of those films as if through the ears of someone who is trying to keep them out, which imbues the soundscape itself with a palpable sense of drama and conflict. It brings to mind something a teacher told us when I was in an acting class at NYU, which is that, when actors are crying in a scene, they likely want to be crying and they are actively trying to cry. But when people in the real world cry, they often want nothing less than to be crying and are trying their absolute hardest not to cry—so the drama and the art comes not from being able to cry on command, but from being able to cry like you wish you weren’t crying, and are trying as hard as possible not to cry.

That acting school lesson isn’t a perfect parallel, but to me it speaks to what I think makes Johnnie Burn such a great artist—the fact that, beyond his immense technical proficiency as a sound designer, there is also such genuine life, character, and story to his soundscapes, and I think that his work on Tuner stands among the best of his career.

There is a lot that I enjoyed about Tuner—from its combination of thrills and romance, to its wonderful cast and the remarkable sound design—so I’m glad that you were able to experience this film on the big screen, with a good sound system, where it belongs.

I hope that you enjoyed Tuner as well, and I look forward to seeing you next time

Best,

Ian

Tuner opens for a run at the JBFC Theater on Friday, May 29.

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