The Teachers’ Lounge

1hr 38mins (12A)

Tense classroom drama ★★★★

“The Teachers’ Lounge is a short-ish German drama about a small sum of money going missing from a jacket in a secondary school staff room” – and it is “chalk-snappingly tense”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Leonie Benesch (Princess Cecilie in The Crown) is “superb” as Ms Nowak, an idealistic young teacher from Poland who has taken up a position at a school in Germany. The school has been contending with a “low-level pickpocketing spree”; and after a Turkish pupil is accused – seemingly wrongfully – Ms Nowak leaves out her coat as bait, and trains a camera on it in an effort to catch the culprit. “Sure enough, after a while it captures an arm reaching into the inside pocket”, clad in the “distinctive blouse” of a member of the admin staff – Ms Kuhn (Eva Löbau). “Case closed? More like can of worms cracked”, as the incident unravels into an “HR nightmare” that is complicated by the fact that Ms Kuhn’s son (“a wonderful Leonard Stettnisch”) is one of Ms Nowak’s favourite pupils. Nominated for best international feature film at this year’s Oscars, the film “strikes upon a dream dramatic formula: a modest story with shattering stakes”.

The first thing you notice about this “terrific, taut” drama is the score, said Wendy Ide in

The Observer: “a choking panic attack in musical form”. It’s typical of the way the film uses “a stripped-back, minimal approach to gripping effect”. Director and co-writer Ilker Çatak “has built an intricate, flammable nest of plotlines” and dangling half-clues, said Ed Potton in The Times. He “resists neat answers, and Benesch anchors the film with a performance of contained subtlety”.