乡下姑娘纳迪娅搬到了城里，成了瓦莉亚公寓里的女佣。身为当地区委委员的 Valya 并不知道 Nadia 爱上了她目前不在身边的丈夫，一位名叫 Maksim 的地质学家。

This film is based on a novel by Boris Vasiliev and takes place in a small Russian provincial town in 1940, one year before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The every day life of class 9B is a larger than life portrait of Stalininism and of unconditional loyalty to party dogma.
At a birthday party a girl, one of the students, recites poetry by a "bourgeois" author. The information leaks out and her liberal father is arrested as a dissident. The daughter is faced by the class teacher and asked to publicly renounce her father which leads to a tragedy. This causes both inner and outer conflicts, the colleagues start to rebel and to question their loyalty, be it to the class teacher or the soviet ideology itself.
With political restrictions in the Soviet Union being gradually lifted in the 1980s, this was one of the first films to mention the previously taboo subject of the night time raids by the KGB, in which innocent people were dragged from their homes and jailed.

"The Tuner" is Muratova's brilliant portrayal of a sick society on the verge of complete moral collapse. Her protagonists are the little people so removed from reality that at times they seem unrealistic, invented, and their actions unmotivated. In the end, their weakness and crushing defeat by the petty con artist gives them moral power that vindicates their social marginality. Their quirkiness, their refusal to live by the rules, or, as in the last scene, to accept their own defeat even when their very survival is at stake, becomes, paradoxically, the last hope for humanity. Against the context of the Orange revolution, "The Tuner" becomes Kira Muratova's prophetic vision of the return of human dignity in her home country.