The Teachers’ Lounge

Ilker Catak / Germany 2023 / 98 min / Cert 12A / Subtitles

A gloriously intense thriller about things that can happen every day – and the dramatic impact of a few wrong decisions, even if taken with good intentions.

Leonie Benesch (The Crown) plays Carla, a dedicated young German high school teacher. When a series of thefts occur and one of her students is suspected, she does some modest detective work – with unexpected consequences.

She then tries to mediate between outraged parents, opinionated colleagues and aggressive students, but is relentlessly confronted by the school system structures, overlaid with national, racial and class resentments.

As we will Carla to transcend the obstacles and threats, the more desperately she tries to do everything right, the more she seems to approach disaster.