Grand Piano

(2012) ★★

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Making a comeback from chronic stage fright, concert pianist Elijah Wood sees a note scrawled in red on his sheet music: “Play one wrong note and you die.” It’s not a joke. It just feels like one. The camera swoops around the Chicago stage and auditorium in highly stylised fashion, but the absurdly contrived script – a veritable symphony of discordant notes from Whiplash man Damien Chazelle – ensures this empty exercise in suspense is closer in tone to latter-day Dario Argento than to prime Brian De Palma (comparisons to Hitchcock are ridiculous). It doesn’t help that the characterisation throughout is so insipid. On the plus side, it’s brief. Grand Piano runs 78 minutes without the end crawl.

Certificate: 15
Duration: 90min