The Teachers' Lounge (2023)

Suspenseful school drama - The Teachers' Lounge review by PD

This excellent piece deals with a variety of themes including trust, manipulation, conformity and abuse of authority, all of the action taking place within the confines of a school filled with hormone-addled children and their beleaguered teachers supposedly observing inscrutable codes of conduct; the film making full use of the dramatic possibilities inherent in its setting.

The story begins with an environment already unsettled by accusations of theft, with young teacher Carla (Leonie Benesch) pulled into a tense conference with other staff and two student representatives. Throughout, the well-intentioned Carla acts like a public defence lawyer, reminding the squirming children that they don’t need to answer which of their classmates may be the thief, whilst her counterproductively vehement colleagues press ahead like they’re detectives trying to break down a reluctant witness (the total inability of the senior staff to deal with serious accusations will be a feature). This issue then morphs into multiple overlapping crises, each of which concerns Carla directly or indirectly, and turn Carla’s once-orderly classroom and then the entire school into a free-fire zone of rumour, innuendo, and recrimination. Throughout, the director keeps us on medium-to-high boil through the film's quick-moving runtime, treating the dramatic developments with full emotional earnestness but without overplaying things - there are even moments when the film pokes fun at some characters’ self-seriousness, such as a great scene involving the staff of the student newspaper treating a 'gotcha' interview with Carla as the equivalent of Watergate. Carla remains admirably idealistic through all the chaos but finds herself more and more isolated; the irony of the film is that in attempting to push back against the group mentality of students or staff, Carla ends up drawing even more attention to her outsider status.

Benesch delivers a performance with an intensity that stops just short of self-martyrdom. But despite presenting Carla as more well-intentioned than almost any of the other adults on show, who largely appear as, if not even more, venal and petty and panicky as the students, this surprisingly suspenseful film doesn’t treat her as a hero, and although the rather truncated conclusion provides few clear answers, it makes clear that regardless of Carla’s genuinely caring nature, being rewarded for it rather than punished isn’t a given. Well worth a look.