2023 | PG-13 | starring Leonie Benesch | directed by Ilker Catak | 1h 38m | In German with Subtitles | 4 1/2 out of 5 stars |
A cache of money is missing from the school teachers’ lounge but when the school accuses an innocent student, the aftermath sends teacher Carla (Leonie Benesch) on a quest to find the real culprit, resulting in a series of increasingly desperate acts that could get her in even more hot water.
Ilker Catak’s The Teachers’ Lounge starts as a workplace drama – one that I don’t think ever leaves the school – and starts ratcheting into a high anxiety thriller that acutely captures the paranoid feeling of really screwing up at work and desperately trying to do what you can to not get caught. But the real fun is the nagging suspicion that this isn’t just the story of one teacher trying to keep her job, but a satirical parable for our power institutions at large. And the movie keeps dropping hints that double and triple down on that notion. The movie’s nods to the Malcolm McDowell school-as-society metaphor If… all but gives away the clever game. I just loved it.
Both a riveting thriller and a character piece, Lounge is also as much fun to talk about and dissect as it is to watch. The school has falsely accused a young boy of the crime, the parents suspect it might be because of his race and the students back him up. Meanwhile, the boy himself (Leonard Stettnisch) is someone troubled and needs the very teacher that accused him of help, the two suddenly trapped in a mutual swan dive of self destruction. But eventually, the students decide if the teachers are going to falsely accuse the kids, why should they be listened to. And there it is. Catak has crafted a top-drawer, hyper-contemporary meta narrative about how our power institutions only have as much power as we give them. If we stop believing in that power, if they pull the curtain on their own human flaws, it ceases to exist. Then for the rest of the movie, we see that institution reacting, through irrationality and sometimes desperate censorship, to hold onto that power. To punish those that question it.
The script is very smart, better than last year’s Anatomy of a Fall, as much as I also liked that movie. But Teachers’ Lounge is a bit grittier, a bit more desperate, more in our face. The movie runs on a terrific, full-bodied performance of Leonie Benesch (Babylon Berlin) conveying everything we need to know about her without ever leaving the immediacy of the drama. No backstory. No trips home to get insight from her family. It’s all in her performance. Its a raw nerve in a movie without any fat on it.
The Teachers’ Lounge works exceptionally well both as a workplace thriller and character deconstruction and as a movie that has it’s finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. Catak explores the international sentiment of a post-Lockdown world where power institutes are working overtime to maintain legitimacy all the while the decisions they make only make them seem less and less credible. Laughably so.