| Director | Todd Field |
|---|---|
| Genre | LGBT-related film, drama film, musical film, psychological film |
| Runtime | 158 min |
| Country | Germany, United States |
| Box office | $29.3 million |
Lydia Tár, chief conductor of a Berlin orchestra, heavily relies on Francesca, her personal assistant and confidante. While being interviewed by Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival, Lydia promotes her upcoming live recording of Mahler's Fifth Symphony and memoir Tár on Tár. She meets with Eliot Kaplan, an investment banker and amateur conductor who co-founded the Accordion Foundation with Lydia to support aspiring female conductors. They discuss technique, replacing Lydia's assistant conductor Sebastian with Francesca, and filling a vacant cello position in Berlin.
As a guest lecturer, Lydia holds a masterclass at Juilliard. When a student expresses reluctance to study Bach due to his social views, she encourages him to focus on composers' music rather than their personal lives. The student leaves in frustration. That night, Lydia anonymously receives a first edition of Vita Sackville-West's novel Challenge with the title page embellished with a hand-drawn kené pattern, a personal reminder of her trip to Peru. She tears up the page and throws it away.
Lydia flies back to Berlin, where she lives with her wife Sharon, the concertmaster of the orchestra, and their daughter Petra. Before a blind audition for the cello position, Lydia spots a young Russian candidate, Olga Metkina, in the bathroom. Lydia changes her scorecard to ensure Olga a spot in the orchestra and proposes to the orchestra that Elgar's Cello Concerto be the companion piece to the Mahler symphony, virtually guaranteeing Olga the soloist position. Lydia's attraction to Olga strains her relationships with Francesca and Sharon.
Krista Taylor, a promising young musician whom Lydia once mentored, has been blacklisted after a dispute with Lydia. After sending disturbing emails to Francesca, Krista ends her own life. Lydia instructs Francesca to delete the emails and hire a lawyer after learning of Krista's parents' plan to sue her. Lydia informs Sebastian of his imminent replacement. Incensed, he calls her out on her inappropriate favoritism, leading Lydia to decide against promoting Francesca.
Lydia is haunted by an increasing sensitivity to sound, surreal nightmares, daytime hallucinations, chronic pain, and enigmatic patterned scribbles resembling those Krista once made. While trying to complete a composition dedicated to Petra, she is disturbed by the sound of a medical device next door, where her neighbor is caring for her dying mother. One day, Lydia falls and hurts herself while attempting to follow Olga home, but tells Sharon she was injured in a mugging.
A manipulatively edited video of Lydia's Juilliard class goes viral, and an article accusing her of sexual predation appears in the New York Post. Lydia's Wikipedia page is also edited by an unseen person to include the controversial new information about her. Lydia tries to contact Francesca, who resigned after being denied the promotion. She breaks into Francesca's home and finds a draft of Tár on Tár, which Francesca has renamed Rat on Rat. Lydia, accompanied by Olga, returns to New York City to attend a deposition for Krista's parents' lawsuit and to promote her book. The two are met by protestors, and Lydia is confronted with incriminating emails between her and Krista that Francesca provided.
In Berlin, Lydia is removed as conductor due to the controversy. Furious over the allegations and Lydia's lack of transparency, Sharon bars her from seeing their daughter. An increasingly depressed and deranged Lydia retreats to her old studio. She sneaks into the live recording she was supposed to conduct, and runs onto the stage to assault Eliot, who replaced her as conductor. Advised to remain out of the public eye by her management, she returns to her modest childhood home on Staten Island, where she finds certificates of achievement bearing her birth name, Linda Tarr. She cries watching an old VHS of Young People's Concerts in which Leonard Bernstein discusses the meaning of music. Her brother Tony arrives and admonishes her for forgetting her roots.
Sometime in the future, Lydia finds work conducting in the Philippines. Seeking a massage, the hotel concierge sends her to a brothel fronting as a massage parlor; the young women sit in a semicircle with numbers on their robes. Number 5 looks directly at Lydia, who rushes outside to vomit. Later, she conducts a live performance of the score for the video game series Monster Hunter in front of an audience of cosplayers.