A string of petty thefts has set the students and faculty at a German middle school on edge.  Ali (Can Rodenbostel), a young boy in Carla’s (Leonie Benesch) 7th grade class is brought in for questioning when a sum of money is discovered in his wallet after the class was subjected to a frisking by the administration.  His friends, parents, and Carla all vouch for the boy but the principal, Dr. Bettina Böhm (Anne-Kathrin Gummich), is unconvinced. Determined to clear her student’s name, Carla leaves her computer open to record a video of the lounge while she is away, but when her video catches the thief in action, the accusations will have far-reaching consequences across the school and the answer to the mystery will cause more problems than before. 

Writer-director Ilker Çatak premiered his German-language drama, The Teachers’ Lounge, at the 2023 edition of the Berlinale where it was met with great acclaim and was submitted by Germany to the 96th Academy Awards, securing a place on the final ballot. The script was written with Johannes Duncker and together the writing pair weaves a moral drama not solely centered on theft, but more so on how we react to accusations, groundless or otherwise, and how people in power will do what they can to protect their own image in the face of scandal. Released stateside by Sony Pictures Classics, the 98-minute film is incredibly relevant proving that corruption and prejudice, unfortunately, have no language barrier. 

On the surface, the film is reminiscent of the work of Asghar Farhadi who often weaves complex tales that find characters at a crossroads between what is moral and what is legal. The Teachers’ Lounge, however, is a far more frustrating experience, not because there is no “right” answer, but because the actions that set the film into motion and the actions taken in its wake are so sloppy.  Everything these characters do is akin to picking a scab; we understand why the action is taken, but we also know that the more we pick the longer it will take to heal and the worse the scar will be. The result of this means that the seams of the argument are clearly apparent and the setups are too precisely laid to really have any major revelations.  While it is true that oftentimes people act out of impulse and those actions may not always be the best route to resolve the issue at hand, no one at this school at any level ever seems to be taking charge and working in a way that makes sense. 

Frustrating as those setups are, if one can silence the urge to shout at the screen, Çatak does deliver a tense, boiling pot thriller for those who give the film a chance to stand on its own. Benesch delivers a really strong performance as the new teacher with the added isolation that German is her second language.  She plays Carla as a sweet and well-intentioned instructor, the kind that you would want as a student, and Çatak does this so that we can build sympathy with Carla despite her poor decision-making. It is not that Carla is an unreliable narrator, she is something similar yet distinctly different from that device. As the narrative unfolds, audiences begin to lose their faith in her, but that base built up in the opening act prevents us from being able to turn away from her completely. Instead, we do end up deeply sympathetic and we hurt along with her when the students begin to rebel against her, but we are also sympathetic towards the students who are lashing out at their own unfair treatment to the only person in power that they have access to. 

Filling out the world of the film, Çatak has quite the collection of students and uses their various personalities to help steer the tension of each scene. For a more nuanced look at how youth interact in the pressure cooker environment of school, Laura Wandel‘s Playground (2022) offers great insight into the schoolyard food chain, and while The Teachers’ Lounge is not as exclusively interested in that dynamic, Çatak utilizes it quite well. The class is defensive of Ali, though the other boys in the class are still quick to rib him on his new reputation as an exonerated criminal. Those same jokes are eventually levied against Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), the son of Friederike Kuhn (Eva Löbau) from the office who was caught on Carla’s tape stealing cash and costing the woman her job. Late in the film, Oskar convinces the class to form a silent protest until Carla answers his questions about what happened to his mother, but when Paul (Goya Rego) walks up to the board to answer a problem, the class is quick to state their displeasure with the boy who is breaking the solidarity of the room. Paul explains that his grades cannot afford a 0 mark or else he will fail, but the damage is done and he has been labeled a traitor by the class and an insubordinate by the office for his outburst in class. The script does well in the classroom, but when Çatak branches out to the school newspaper office with the 8th graders who seem more like 12th graders in how they tower over the frame, he loses his edge as the argument he gives them, while valiant, is too bluntly handled for the kind of story which he was telling.  They are fighting for the freedom of the press and information, and though it tracks in the context of the film, its reach is a little too wide for what the otherwise clandestine experiment was trying to prove. 

The Teachers’ Lounge is nonetheless an interesting experiment to witness even if it does not feel as precise as it needed to be to really interrogate the pillars of leadership which Çatak was looking to chip away at. Benesch navigates the trials of the script well, lending an affable and well-natured spirit to Carla that her constant stumbling over herself is believable for much of the film, and Löbau also delivers a strong performance whose insistence on her innocence – a requirement for the story to work – is as admirable as it is beguiling. It does require a good bit of suspension of disbelief given that it is set in the present day yet individual access to the students is so open, but Çatak made the right choice as setting it in the past would dilute the urgency of the issues which he is addressing here. Unfortunately, the film as presented is a bit of a headscratcher, as Çatak got to the right answers, but his work – the approach to this metaphor about power, protection, and censorship – was flawed. It requires too much of looking the other way from people who should know better, and while that happens all too often in real life, as an audience we almost always hold our characters to a higher standard, and such is true with The Teachers’ Lounge. Çatak puts us in this position with his unhoned premise, but we are not entirely guiltless either in the softer-than-it-should-have-been impact of the film.