Directed by Daniel Roher
Tuner follows Niki White (played by Leo Woodall), the apprentice of piano tuner Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), and a tragic genius. Once a gifted pianist, Niki developed hyperacusis—an increased sensitivity to sound that prevents him from playing the piano and requires him to wear hearing protection at all times. After Harry forgets the combination to his safe, Niki teaches himself to open it by listening to the lock’s subtle sounds. When Harry is later hospitalized, Niki begins cracking safes to pay off his mentor’s mounting medical debt.
By the film’s second act, Niki’s increasingly dangerous work jeopardizes both his safety and his relationship with his girlfriend Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), leaving him to confront the consequences of his actions. When Niki makes amends in the third act, Uri (Lior Raz), the leader of the criminal group in which he has become entangled, viciously beats him. The injury costs him part of his hearing but enables his return to the piano.
Tuner is engaging, beautifully constructed, and emotionally resonant. At the same time, it turns disability into a plot device. Marking director and co-writer Daniel Roher’s fiction debut, the film fully embraces the artistic license afforded by the genre, casting hyperacusis as a superpower rather than focusing on the condition’s often debilitating effects.
To be fair, Niki mentions that, at one point, even the sound of his own voice was agonizing. He is constantly on guard against potentially harmful sounds. When confronted with barking dogs, smoke alarms, air horns, and gunshots, he winces and clutches his ringing ears.
But the impact is fleeting. In real life, exposure to noises like these can permanently worsen hyperacusis. Furthermore, the hearing disorder is not a “superhuman” tool; many individuals with hyperacusis show normal hearing thresholds. For those with milder cases, everyday sounds like a running dishwasher can cause significant discomfort. In more severe cases, even near silence can be excruciatingly painful. One wonders how Niki could tolerate the clicks, clacks, and whirs of piano keys and combination locks (another creative liberty: modern safes are designed to thwart auditory decoding).
As disability studies scholar Rebecca Garden argues, there are “tensions between the lived experience of illness… and the conventions that shape the representations of those experiences in published narratives.” [1] In other words, the demand for drama often precludes verisimilitude, instead favoring a happy ending of triumph over adversity. Niki’s liberation from his condition is narratively satisfying; another, if less commercially successful, film might depict a similar character learning to live with it.
In his seminal text The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (2013), sociologist Arthur Frank enumerates three types of illness stories: restitution, chaos, and quest. The restitution narrative “has the basic storyline: ‘Yesterday I was healthy, today I’m sick, but tomorrow I’ll be healthy again,’” the chaos narrative “imagines life never getting better,” and the quest narrative “accept[s] illness and seek[s] to use it.”
Tuner follows a kind of restitution storyline: Yesterday Niki was a healthy prodigy, today he cannot perform because he is sick with an exploitable “superpower,” but tomorrow a thief will effectively cure him by rupturing his eardrums. The film also features aspects of the quest narrative; to quote Frank, Niki “returns as one who is no longer ill but remains marked by illness”—that is, no longer hyperacusic but partially deaf. Niki is figuratively reborn with a new purpose, embodying the film’s Spider-Mannish moral logic: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Despite these quest elements, Niki’s story remains fundamentally a restitution narrative. Frank notes that such narratives are “culturally preferred” and calls for “an enhanced tolerance for chaos.” To that end, future films might engage more directly with the lived experience of hyperacusis. Ultimately, however, Roher’s approach is understandable and even commendable, using the possibilities of cinema to draw attention to some of the challenges of a rare, if romanticized, disability.
[1] Garden, Rebecca. “Telling Stories about Illness and Disability: The Limits and Lessons of Narrative.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 53, no. 1, 2010, pp. 121–135.
Photo credit: Black Bear
