THE TEACHERS' LOUNGE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Teachers' Lounge, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 23, 2023

An unexpected pseudo-thriller, The Teachers' Lounge creates near-unbearable tension out of a grounded workplace scenario in a seemingly unlikely place (One imagines any teacher would argue with the point of it being "unlikely," though). The story is set exclusively in the classrooms, hallways, and administrative offices of an ordinary middle school somewhere in Germany. Within the confines of this space, screenwriters İlker Çatak, who also directed, and Johannes Duncker create a high-stakes world of interpersonal squabbles, office politics, and a dichotomy between doing what one believes to be the right thing and realizing the practical fallout when questions of good manners, morality, and the law become involved.

At times, this tale becomes like a waking nightmare for Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), the teacher at its center. She's very good at her job, if some early scenes of classroom harmony and displays of her dedication to the safety and privacy of her students are any indication, but by the end of this, we have to wonder if that's actually the case. It has nothing to do with her, of course, but it does have everything to do with the way she perceives herself and her difficulty to imagine the perception others might have of her.

Perception is key to the plot, which begins even before we know it. Someone or some people in school are stealing money and supplies across the building. Teachers' wallets are being cleaned of cash, which is an understandable target for a thief, and at least a box of a thousand pencils has disappeared, behind which nobody can figure out a reasonable motive. Two school administrators—Thomas Liebenwerda (Michael Klammer) and Milosz Dudek (Rafael Stachoivak), who shares a Polish background with our protagonist—assume the culprit is a student.

They begin an investigation, interrogating members of the student government—trying to coerce them to give up information about their peers—and stopping classes to search students' personal belongings. All of it is "voluntary," obviously, since these kids are supposed to have a certain set of rights, and Carla stands up for her class to the best of her ability.

Those kids in her class seem to like her, since they participate in a choreographed routine of greeting each other every day, but children are more opinionated and perceptive than most adults—even a teacher like Carla—believe. Later, they'll tell her exactly what they think of that morning routine, and they definitely notice that the teachers are in turmoil and that Ms. Nowak appears to be at the end of her rope after rumors and gossip start to fly.

Fed up with the treatment of the students, Carla decides to take the matter of a different investigation into the stealing into her own hands. She sets up a trap, putting some money in her jacket pocket, adjusting her laptop at just the right angle, and turning on the computer's camera before heading off to class. When she returns to the teachers' lounge, the cash is gone, and the recording shows, not the face of the thief, but a telltale top, decorated in stars. It's the same blouse being worn by Friederike Kuhn (Eva Löbau), one of the secretaries in the school's front office.

From there, all hell breaks loose. Carla confronts the woman who definitely appears to be, if not the infamous thief stealing all sorts of things of late, then the person who stole money from her. She offers to let it slide if the money is returned and a promise is made to stop stealing, but Friederike denies it repeatedly. Carla follows through on it with the school's principal (played by Anne-Kathrin Gummich), who shows Friederike the seemingly incriminating tape but only receives more denials. It's not actual proof, the secretary insists, because her face is nowhere to be seen in the video.

Everything escalates from there, and the resulting story is much more about how suspicion tears apart an insulated little community than it is about the mystery of Friederike's (unlikely) innocence or (probable) guilt. Faculty and staff members want to see the evidence, because some of them were robbed, too. Carla can't just show it to them, because the whole mess is about to become a police affair. They're suspicious of Carla, too, because she filmed the teachers' lounge, after all, without anyone being aware of the fact. Where was all that passion for the privacy of the students when she violated her colleagues' privacy?

The debates, the arguments, and the gossip just keep compiling here, as students take sides, too. They begin to make insinuations about Ali (Can Rodenbostel), the kid who initially was questioned about the thievery, and Oskar (Leo Stettnisch), who is Friederike's son and doesn't understand why his teacher put his mother out of her job. Those questions, as well as the fear of what might happen to his mom, start to affect Oskar in ways Carla desperately wants to address, for the kid's own good, but can't, given her involvement in the scandal that led to Oskar's current state of mind.

The student newspaper, filled with a group of kids who really know their stuff, turn an ordinary interview with Ms. Nowak into an investigation of why the teachers and staff presumed the thief had to be a student (The whole sequence of this momentary subplot is equal parts funny, because these students seem so grown-up in their element, and encouraging, if any real kids such as these could be the future of reporting). At one point, those kids compare the tactics of the school's administration to an authoritarian regime, and honestly, they have a point—if not about the school itself, then certainly in the way the whole film does become akin to an allegory for how people use, abuse, and don't comprehend the extent of their own power.

Mostly, though, the film is a claustrophobic depiction of how dreadful an ostensibly simple, straightforward series of deeds can spiral out of control. It's uncomfortably realistic in the way political complications and emotional ones pile atop each other, and through the whole of The Teachers' Lounge, Benesch gives an astonishingly subdued performance of inner conflict and rising exasperation. If the ending feels a bit like an anticlimactic payoff to the heightened drama preceding it, that's pretty much accurate, too.

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