Niki White has ultra-sensitive hearing. Though loud noises can be debilitating, he uses his skillset to tune pianos—and crack safes. Ironically, Tuner can be an earful, sporting more than a hundred uses of the f-word alone. And some visceral violence and brief sensuality add to the film’s intensity.
Niki White is something of a piano virtuoso.
When he was just 7 years old, Niki could already play the instrument better than most professional pianists. If you play a note—or even a chord of notes—he can name exactly which piano key you’re touching.
Unfortunately, Niki hasn’t tickled the ivories in many years.
He was diagnosed with a hearing disorder called hyperacusis, which is like an allergy to loud noises. If things get too boisterous, it causes Niki immense pain and leaves him with a ringing noise in his ears.
Niki underwent exposure therapy for a couple of years to build up his tolerance to softer volumes and tones, such as a person’s voice. But he still must wear earplugs, even when he’s sleeping. And sometimes, he even has to put noise-cancelling headphones over those, too.
However, while Niki’s sensitive eardrums can’t handle the thunderous crescendos of your typical music halls, his heightened sense does make him rather good at tuning the ol’ eighty-eights. That’s how he wound up working as a piano tuner alongside his dad’s old buddy, Harry Horowitz.
Still, tuning pianos doesn’t pay much—or, at least, it doesn’t pay Harry much, since he’s refused to increase his prices over the last 30 years. So when Harry falls ill, his wife, Marla, informs Niki just how strapped for cash the elderly couple is. Marla isn’t sure how she’s going to pay for Harry’s hospital bills. She’s not even sure she can afford to keep Harry’s work van, which Niki needs to get to and from jobs.
But Niki thinks he might be able to help Harry and Marla, who have been like an uncle and aunt to him.
Niki’s disability (or, I suppose in this case, just ability) allows him to hear things that nobody else can—things like the tumblers of a safe clicking into position.
Niki is hesitant to use his skills for ill. But the crew who wants to hire him as a safecracker insists that the people they plan on robbing won’t miss a thing. People with too much stuff don’t appreciate it as much as people with less, they say. And if someone does notice their belongings missing, they’ll likely just blame it on the housemaid and file an insurance claim.
It’s not an ideal situation, but the money is good. And Niki really doesn’t want Harry and Marla to suffer after all they’ve done for him.
He’ll just work a few jobs to pay Harry’s bills. Just enough for him to get the collateral he needs to take out a business loan. Just enough to start his own piano-tuning company.
Niki should’ve known things would end in dis-chord.
Niki makes some bad choices: There’s no doubt about that. However, flawed as his methods may be, at least his motives were altruistic. Mostly. Wanting to help Harry and Marla was certainly kind—even if how he helped them is a problem.
That said, when things in the safecracking business take a turn for the worse—when somebody physically gets hurt—Niki doesn’t try to justify his actions. He tries to leave the business behind. It doesn’t work, of course, but at least he tries to correct his mistakes.
Marla and Harry bicker like an old married couple, but it’s evident how much they love each other. And they care a great deal for Niki, too.
A man says he wants to open a sanctuary for abandoned dogs where the dogs are never put down, even if they’re never adopted.
Several characters in the film, including Harry, are Jewish. We see some men wearing yarmulkes at a Jewish funeral.
When a member of Niki’s crew learns they stole watches that belonged to people who died in the Holocaust, he says it’s “bad juju” to keep the jewelry.
Niki falls in love with an aspiring composer and accomplished pianist named Ruthie. We see the young couple kiss on several occasions. One scene acts as a leadup to sex, with hands sliding beneath clothing, but the camera cuts away before things go further. Later in the film, we see Niki and Ruthie sleeping in bed together, with Niki shirtless.
Niki and his crew find pictures of naked women hidden inside one of the safes they rob. Uri, the man who hires Niki to crack those safes, invites Niki to a rave to meet “hot” women. Niki and Harry are surprised when a client answers the door in her underwear. She quickly covers herself with her robe, but Harry has a difficult time hiding his grin. We can see a woman’s bra through her shirt in several scenes. There are some nude marble statues by a pool in someone’s home.
As already mentioned, when Niki gets exposed to loud noises, it causes him immense pain. Niki flinches and presses his noise-cancelling headphones tighter over his ears on multiple occasions throughout the film. But one day, a smoke alarm catches him off guard when he’s hanging out at Ruthie’s. And in two other instances, someone purposely uses an airhorn to immobilize Niki.
Niki’s crew gets held at gunpoint during a robbery gone wrong. The person holding the gun forces Niki to rip up and eat a piece of paper containing cyber codes. Somebody is shot and killed. Another person gets manhandled and essentially abducted. A man swings a bat at someone’s head but misses.
A man beats up Niki, bloodying Niki’s face and kicking him to the ground. We later see Niki bandaged up in a hospital bed. Someone cuts off part of a man’s ear with a switchblade. We don’t see a lot of blood during the act, but we do see the man’s heavily stitched ear later on. Somebody loses a great portion of his hearing after extreme trauma causes his eardrum to rupture.
A man is loaded into an ambulance and sent to a hospital. Apparently, he had a heart attack. And he later passes away. Some characters talk about family members who were killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
We hear the f-word more than 100 times and the s-word about 20. Sprinkled in are uses of “a–,” “a–hole,” “b–ch,” “c–k,” “d–n,” “d–mit,” “d–k,” “p-ss,” “pr–k” and “p—y.” Some of these profanities are spoken in a foreign language with English subtitles. God’s name is misused three times, once paired with “d–mit,” and Jesus’ name is misused once.
Niki and several other characters smoke cigarettes. Someone vapes. Characters occasionally drink alcohol.
Members of Niki’s crew snort a white powder during one job. They open a safe to reveal a couple-dozen plastic-wrapped packets of the stuff.
Obviously, Niki and his crew are breaking the law by robbing people’s homes, no matter how undeserving they may feel those people are. Uri lies about how some of those people earned their money in order to manipulate Niki into helping him with the safes. Uri shows a clear disregard for anyone who might get blamed for his crimes, such as the cleaning staff of the houses he robs.
Some of Niki and Harry’s piano-tuning clients treat them like general handymen, asking them to fix toilets and reset Wi-Fi routers. Sadly, many of their clients don’t even play the pianos they own: The instruments are purely decorative.
Niki doesn’t tell Ruthie about his safecracking side hustle. So when things start to get dangerous, rather than tell her about what’s happening, he starts acting mean toward her.
Characters lie. We hear some talk about discrimination against people with foreign accents. Harry, who is hard of hearing, makes a rude comment about a person’s dog right in front of her.
Harry, we hear, fell into debt because he refused to pay his ever-increasing insurance premiums. When he’s in the hospital, he suffers from some confusion, mistakenly believing he had a conversation with Niki’s dad one afternoon even though Niki’s dad has been dead for several years.
A man vomits after witnessing someone get shot.
If my ears were so sensitive that just the sound of someone’s regular speaking voice could cause me pain, I think I would reconsider the sorts of conversations I would expose myself to. For instance, I don’t think I’d want to hang around somebody who dropped the f-word like it was the new “the”—let alone watch a movie where it gets used more than a hundred times.
No, I think that if my hearing was half as delicate as Niki’s is, Tuner wouldn’t even be on my watchlist for just that reason.
The film itself has a very intriguing storyline. There are a few sensual, though not explicit, scenes. And some visceral (but brief) violence plays out, too, but it’s not exactly surprising, given the circumstances. Really, did Niki anticipate that he’d never get caught robbing safes? Or did he really think the crew who hired him would let him stop once he started?
I suppose Niki’s tale serves as a cautionary one. But it’s really quite the shame. The young man truly has some incredible gifts—if only he had chosen to use them for good rather than ill.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
