‘The Teachers' Lounge’ REVIEW: A most stressful scholarly thriller
‘The Teachers' Lounge’ REVIEW: A most stressful scholarly thriller
One of the tensest, tautest, most nail-biting thrillers in recent memory, The Teachers’ Lounge is a German drama that reaches under the audience’s skin with gradual meticulousness, helped by its deceptively simple setting, often touted as one of society’s agreed-on safe spaces: a school.
The Teachers’ Lounge has been compared to Uncut Gems for the non-stop stress it seems to cause viewers, but any comparisons to the latter — which features more outlandish situations — fall apart when one sees how the former so casually stacks its situations of inconvenience and misunderstanding on top of one another like a steadily escalating game of Jenga that’s set to erode relationships by its end.
When the film starts, it’s clear that there is no time for exposition. The narrative kicks off somewhat in media res, as after a single phone call and a brief tour through the school hallways, our protagonist Carla — a new teacher whose youth relative to her colleagues complements her idealism and contrasts her seriousness — enters a classroom to sit down with two teachers who are interrogating two students about a series of petty thefts from the teachers’ lounge that has apparently been going on since way before the movie starts.
Carla is the fairest questioner, maintaining the students have the right to remain silent while her fellow teachers charge on in the pursuit of justice and in compliance with the almighty no-tolerance policy that looms over the entire film. Carla is clearly still at her most stable state at this point and thus barely wavers in her beliefs, but the film soon shows how even the strongest optimists can crumble under the weight of an oppressive system.
These opening scenes paint a picture of what we will soon experience — the slow intrusion of disquiet into the inner workings of daily life. With each onscreen minute that passes, an additional layer of dread is lathered on the narrative and another thread of Carla’s sanity unravels.
A tense scene where Carla’s colleagues interrupt her class and force every male student to turn over their wallets for inspection, followed by the wrongful accusation of Turkish student Ali (with more than a little racial profiling attached to it), which finally prompts the quixotic Carla to conduct her own amateur sting operation.
She sets up her laptop to secretly record footage in the teachers’ lounge that implicates a woman in a distinctive blouse. This leads her to administrative colleague Ms. Kuhn, whose angry rejection of Carla’s accusation is the fateful domino that sends the pieces of the movie cascading into a perfect collapse which we are powerless to stop.
The web of accusations, implications, and assumptions grows even more tangled as the movie continues. Carla’s relationship with Oskar, one of her favorite students and the son of the accused Ms. Kuhn, disintegrates once he realizes that Carla has something to do with the withdrawal of his mother. A parent-teacher meeting descends into chaos once the parents criticize the teachers for their strict interrogation methods. Students start to rebel, refusing to do homework or participate in class.
Every piece of the academic ecosystem — parent, teacher, student — all sink into the quicksand of deep mistrust not just against others, but with each other. And through it all, Carla persists on her Sisyphean duty to keep the peace, hear everyone out, and prevent the spiraling escalation born out of her one decision to take matters into her own hands.
Perhaps the film’s most ingenious quality is how it presents its academic setting as a microcosm of a larger society, a world with its own panopticon of power and policies, a reflection of social ills that infect each person with bad faith in each other. It’s remarkable how methodical the film is so as to show that no one is at fault and yet everyone is at fault. There are no foreseeable solutions that do not have anything to do with simple and open communication, or even a dismantling of a punitive system run on relentless justice and punishment, instead of nurturing and understanding.
Every single aspect of The Teachers’ Lounge works overtime to convey the quiet tragedy of such an environment meant to foster children’s growth. İlker Çatak’s confident directorial hand and cinematographer Judith Kaufmann’s eye for externalizing relentless negative feeling weave an airtight ecosystem characterized by a claustrophobic, boxy 4:3 aspect ratio and a handheld quality that immerses us into the world of the film. Composer Marvin Miller’s tightly wound violin string score that plucks and sings in the background whenever Carla is on the verge of a nervous breakdown is just the cherry on top of a feel-bad atmosphere.
The most impressive technical player, however, has to be Leonie Benesch in the lead role. She is fantastic, a truly spectacular performer whose inhabitation of the young, hopeful teacher is so natural that a performance is not what we see, but a fully realized person. As Carla, she actively pushes back against the pervasive air of resentment and suspicion created by every other technical aspect of the film.
She tries to correct her wrongs, tries to do right by every student who doesn’t return her same efforts, tries to talk down teachers whose relationships with their students seem more enforcer-follower than mentor-mentee. Sometimes she doesn’t make the right call, especially in a deeply uncomfortable interview scene with a group of student journalists who mercilessly interrogate her about the recent developments in the school. Sometimes she does, but even these are futile actions which she bravely (and naively) believes can make a sizable difference.
The decisions made by each character may frustrate us, but it is a delicious kind of frustration birthed by a perfect storm of painstakingly crafted facets that make up a terrifying world that eerily reflects our own. In this film, a land of learning becomes a land of endless battles, a warzone with every man out for himself.
This is not so far from how personal agendas and near-fascistic ideas have infected places and environments meant for growth and beauty. That’s what makes The Teachers’ Lounge so timely and necessary in our current sociopolitical climate. That’s what makes it, quiet as it's kept, one of the best dramas in recent memory.
The Teachers’ Lounge was recently part of the 2024 KinoFest lineup.
