The Big Picture

Carla Nowak, the protagonist of The Teachers’ Lounge, tries to empower her students but is limited by a corrupt system and institutional problems that she can’t fully combat. The tight framing and aspect ratio of the film’s visuals reflect the restrictive nature of Nowak’s role and the suffocating environment of the school. Leonie Benesch delivers a mesmerizing performance as Nowak, conveying her inner pain and increasing desperation with subtle facial expressions. The script maintains absorbing moral ambiguity and suspense, reflecting the reality of trying to make a difference within a corrupt institution.

Teachers can change people’s lives. What the new Ilker Çatak feature The Teachers’ Lounge presupposes is…what if a teacher changed people’s lives for the worse? So it is with Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), the protagonist of The Teachers’ Lounge. Nowak is not an evil human being. On the contrary, she’s quite empathetic to her students and tries to empower them to be deeply idiosyncratic human beings. She also expresses disbelief with some of the actions of her fellow teachers that will socially isolate the youngsters she’s teaching. Some of those actions include singling out male students suspected of being at the center of a string of robberies at this middle school.

The Teachers’ Lounge When one of her students is suspected of theft, teacher Carla Nowak decides to get to the bottom of the matter. Caught between her ideals and the school system, the consequences of her actions threaten to break her. Release Date May 4, 2023 Director Ilker Çatak Cast Leonie Benesch , Leonard Stettnisch , Eva Löbau , Michael Klammer Rating PG-13 Runtime 98 minutes Main Genre Drama Genres Drama Writers Johannes Duncker , Ilker Çatak

Trying to solve those thefts will only bring Nowak more despair and inspire further chaos amongst her students, as she ends up secretly recording a video that potentially implicates fellow teacher Friederike Kuhn (Eva Löbau) in this string of crimes. The enraged Kuhn maintains her innocence as does her sullen son, who happens to be one of Novak’s students. Tensions only increase from here as Kuhn is put on a leave of absence, her child demands that Nowak claim his mom is innocent, and our central teacher struggles with figuring out what the “right thing” to do is in this harrowing scenario. With The Teachers’ Lounge, Ilker Çatak has crafted a fantastically gripping motion picture that vividly reflects how even the best of intentions can be swallowed up by corrupt institutions.

The Visual Details Shine in ‘The Teachers’ Lounge’

Cinematographer Judith Kauffman frames The Teachers’ Lounge in a tight 1.37:1 aspect ratio. This key visual choice serves as an extension of the intentionally limited scope of the script by Çatak and Johannes Duncker, both literally (we rarely leave the middle school) and figuratively (viewers only get to see one perspective on key events). However, it’s also a detail that emphasizes a key theme of The Teachers’ Lounge: the restrictive level of “good” one can create when occupying a position of power in an innately damaged system. If you’re the “good cop” in a given scenario, you’re still a cop, after all.

Similarly, Nowak does her best to encourage her students to be individual people or to protect certain vulnerable youngsters, but there’s only so much she can do. She still has to defer to her superiors and often only offers retrospective condemnations of bad choices made by fellow educators. She’ll still sit in on meetings where non-white parents are brought in by her co-workers to be accused of malicious lies. Meanwhile, late into The Teachers’ Lounge, she notes that the principal’s banning of the school’s newspaper is “severe,” but she still instructs everyone to hand over their copies of this publication.

Nowak is a tragic demonstration of how one can only do so much to keep the bad of intrinsically rotten systems at bay. Kauffman’s cinematography vividly reflects that with its tight framing leaning on that 1.37:1 aspect ratio. There is minimal space in the frame just as there is minimal room for Nowak to make her desired positive impact at this school. With this framing, the walls of locations like the titular lounge feel suffocatingly cramped while supporting characters barking complaints at Nowak are often just out of the viewer’s line of sight. That latter detail is a subtly brilliant element capturing how omnipresent the problems around Nowak are; even if we can’t see them, they’re still leaving an impact on her psyche. That aspect ratio works wonders in inspiring some of the most striking imagery of The Teachers’ Lounge and in making a seemingly ordinary location (a middle school) unsettling.

Çatak wisely leans heavily on the visuals of The Teachers’ Lounge to the point that key scenes, like a later confrontation between Nowak and Kuhn during a parent/teacher night, transpire without any accompanying score and minimal sound effects. Just the performances and camerawork are enough to carry this tense reunion. The mastery informing such sparse scenes told through steady camerawork makes more overwhelming sequences in The Teachers’ Lounge remarkably powerful. A later sequence involving a trust exercise in gym class gone awry is an especially great demonstration of this with its constant cuts, disorienting camerawork, and a cavalcade of noise. That earlier parent/teacher night saw Nowak still thinking she could exhibit some level of control over the world. With the excellently realized frantic filmmaking qualities of this gym scene, The Teachers’ Lounge makes it apparent any power of hers has slipped away. The contrasts between these two sequences crystallize the precise filmmaking on display here.

‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ Is Anchored by One of the Year’s Best Performances
Image via Sony Pictures Classics

Just on a visual level, The Teachers’ Lounge is already well worth a watch. However, if there’s any other key reason to check this title out, it’s the lead performance from Leonie Benesch. A quietly captivating feat of acting, Benesch is tasked with portraying a woman who has to always put on an exterior shell to please those around her. She has to be a soothing, but firm authority figure for her students. She has to be agreeable but decisive to her co-workers (who are already hostile to her as both a new teacher and someone originating from Poland). Nowak is always being pulled in so many different directions and obligations.

In portraying such a complicated soul, Benesch leans on her vivid eyes to communicate the interior life of this educator. Within those pupils, one can see so much pain peeking out through this character even when she plays the de-escalator other tormented people can turn to for help. There’s a discernible sense of humanity in those eyes that captures your attention and often your sympathy as well. Just a facial expression from this performer speaks volumes about what’s going on under the surface for Nowak. Those skills and other gifts are also utilized by Benesch to portray the gradually increasing presence of franticness within Nowak’s demeanor. It’s a remarkable sight to watch an actor so assuredly portray a human steadily being pulled apart by external forces. There’s no other word than mesmerizing for what Leonie Benesch accomplishes here in The Teachers’ Lounge.

This is also found in the script by Çatak and Duncker, which wrings remarkable drama that never loses sight of absorbing moral ambiguity. The Teachers’ Lounge always keeps one enraptured over a consistently shifting sense of who’s in “the right” or “wrong” within this narrative. After all, the school that this movie occupies is inherently one with institutional problems (like racial profiling), which already makes the administration’s definitions of “lawful” and “unlawful” suspect. It is a story riddled with morally ambiguous behavior and characters navigating their nuanced psychologies. You won’t find snappy resolutions or easily definable senses of morality here. The Teachers’ Lounge instead focuses on incredibly engaging suspense sequences built on making the audience guess who they sympathize with. This quality vividly reflects the reality of trying to carve out an existence within a corrupt institution (not to mention the innately tragic problems of trying to remold that institution for the better from the inside) that makes for a movie you just can’t turn away from. The Teachers’ Lounge is an absorbing feat all about the ways a single person can make a difference, just not in the positive ways they may have expected.

Rating: 9/10

The Teachers’ Lounge comes to limited theaters in the U.S. starting December 25. Click below for showtimes.

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