The Teachers’ Lounge
Writer/director Ilker Çatak's The Teachers' Lounge presents a microcosm of society from the bustling corridors of a modernist German secondary school. With a central plot surrounding students being suspected of stealing from faculty members, Çatak transforms a soap opera setting into an utterly gripping pressure cooker of a thriller, identifying and elevating issues of prejudice, coercion and post-fact politics in a film that takes the tenets of the suspense genre and reanimates them with brutal efficiency.
The Teachers' Lounge follows idealistic young educator Carla Nowak - played with taciturn believability by Leonie Benesch - as she attempts to operate within a cynical, self-serving school faculty alongside a student body whose rights, and knowledge of them, places them and their parents in a position of authority over the increasingly powerless teachers. Ilker's fourth feature, co-written with regular collaborator Johannes Duncker, was conceived as a low budget independent picture, set in one of Germany's free to attend and largely state funded schools.
Çatak's enthralling drama satisfyingly covers significant ground in its slim running time - a refreshing 98 mins- examining the strained structures of modern civilisation and the often visible cracks running through them. Çatak and Duncker’s stripped down script scrutinises professional and intergenerational communication alongside the rhetoric of ideology, neatly offset by the burbling undercurrent of the ongoing and ever-shifting culture war. Is the film a warning against repeating the mistakes of the past? Or are we destined to continually commit the same errors again?
Advantageous Restrictions
From its swiftly plotted screenplay to its one location shoot, Ilker's lean yet layered picture eschews any substantial backstory for either its premise or characters. Everything on screen occurs within the confines of the school - bar one, short altercation which also begins on the school grounds - with outside lives only hinted at through conversation, body language or a rare phone call. Enveloped in the school's endemic browns and blues, Corsage cinematographer Judith Kaufmann tightly ramps up the claustrophobia by shooting in the distinctly narrower 1:33:1 Academy ratio.
Çatak and the film’s production team saw the restrictions placed on the picture by its small budget as an opportunity to concentrate the story in just a few rooms, distilling the tension and claustrophobia of a wider community into the unmistakably universal setting of the school. The risks paid off, with The Teachers' Lounge achieving widespread critical and commercial success in homeland Germany, sweeping the board at the 2023 German Film Awards and also receiving a coveted Academy Award nomination for Best International feature in 2024.
Staging events in a small area to create tension and in turn reveal a person’s or a community’s true character has long been a dramatic device used in cinema. Hitchcock's three hander Rope (1948) - a party set in just one apartment with a closely concealed corpse under the buffet table - often appears as an early Hollywood blueprint for parlour piece chillers, as does his own Rear Window (1954). Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957) similarly throws its unravelling jurors into a single room to decide the fate of an accused murderer amidst a breathless New York City summer.
The Teachers' Lounge does not however venture home, with the school within it serving as proxy. From Jodie Foster's war against Brownstone invaders in David Fincher's Panic Room (2002) to Michael Haneke's ghoulish holiday home treatise on screen violence and voyeurism Funny Games (1997/2007), or Ben Wheatley's tower terror High Rise (2015) and Jordan Peele's horror subversion Us (2019), destabilising the sanctity of a seemingly safe refuge often pays dividends in terms of tension as it hits audiences where they live. In Çatak’s film, his characters are the school.
Genre At its Best
Even with its score - a sparse, thrumming stakes builder from Marvin Miller - The Teacher's Lounge achieves a lot with seemingly very little as Çatak and co. manage to turn production restrictions into the film's core power. Whether taking place in one room or one building - the latter here - rendering a film's singular setting as its entire world raises the dramatic stakes exponentially. Çatak succeeds in creating a picture that exudes claustrophobia yet creates cinematic scale, giving us a fully realised world from a limited palette. His characters are simultaneously surrounded and isolated.
The positioning of Nowak - as an idealistic young teacher surrounded by cynicism and an seemingly archaic structure - draws on similar explorations of the self as Ari Aster’s Scandinavian shocker Midsommar (2019). Aster’s picture sees the recently bereaved and orphaned Dani (Florence Pugh) relinquishing her pain on becoming part of an ancient tradition. Nowak could be Dani’s mirror, fighting against the system to her own detriment and knowing the only way for her martyrdom to end is to join the ranks of the cynical and churn out another generation of kids with the same mindset.
Isolation in a crowd unsettles the audience, it has us watch out for the stand out, waiting for them to be knocked into shape or transcend to create something or someone new, hopefully for the better. Rose Glass’s quietly terrifying Saint Maude (2019) similarly looks to transform its heroine when the world ignores her and her piety. Glass picks up the theme of re-becoming, along with its consequences, in noir thriller Love Lies Bleeding (2024). In both Glass’s pictures, a building feeling of dread grows out of mundanity, something Çatak’s film shares with famed French thriller Caché (2005).
Right or Wrong
In an early scene of The Teacher’s Lounge, two children are coerced by faculty members into revealing which of their class mates they think ‘might’ be capable of stealing. The consequences for their seeming obedience under duress are a catalyst for both Nowak’s disillusionment and the unravelling of the delicate social structure of her class. Nowak’s attempts to ‘do the right thing’ ultimately entrenches her isolation as the faculty, children and parents all turn on her. We are given glimpses of the power of rumour and points of view become political standpoints as battle lines are drawn firm.
In Austrian auteur Micheal Haneke’s Caché, well-to-do Parisian couple Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are terrorised by a stalker sending surveillance footage of their home. Late into the picture, a shocking childhood secret is revealed from which the characters must deal with the fallout. Both Caché and The Teachers’ Lounge explore trust, guilt, grief and consequence, forgoing pious notions of right and wrong and attempting to track the outward ripples of poor decision making, demonstrating just how quickly ordered lives can turn to chaos.
As The Teachers’ Lounge progresses, each faction doubles down on their chosen course of action: morally upstanding Nowak; her class of justice seeking disruptors; the parents who think Nowak out of her depth; and the faculty who actively seek to undermine and even shame instead of helping. Ill-conceived decisions over time in movies often ratchet up the tension, leaving audiences dismayed at characters not being able to see where they are headed. See the Safdie Bros.’s unbearably tense crime thrillers Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019) or Todd Filed’s TÁR (2023).
Anatomy of a Film
Throughout The Teacher’s Lounge, Çatak evokes some of Germany’s darkest recent history as incidences of racial and economic profiling, scapegoating and mob rule conjure the well worn methods of social control used by the Nazi Party, before and during its time in power, and later across the Soviet governed and Stasi controlled East Germany. Even as the school’s older children play at journalism, which Nowak fully supports, the real world consequences are undeniable when she is pilloried and quoted out of context following a poorly judged agreement to be interviewed.
Nowak slowly awakens to the notion of a post fact existence where all those operating within it believe themselves to be right, with conviction trumping fact. Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) - featuring Benesch’s second film performance - asks similar questions as the calm veneer of a fictional rural village is cracked to reveal its disturbing innards. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2024) takes a more literal view following the daily lives of a concentration camp commandant and his wife, raising their family in Poland, with Auschwitz and all of its horrors just a few feet away.
These pictures share an uncanny ability to unsettle the audience. Their everyday settings run on autopilot and discipline, their issues trivial and often swiftly resolved. Yet they belie a chaos merely hinted at, just out of reach, mirroring modern societies and our ability to look elsewhere when things turn tough. In The Teachers’ Lounge, Kaufmann’s camera stalks Nowak like a would be killer, unknown, watching her going about her day as if waiting for the moment to strike that never physically comes. A type of voyeurism that is endemic of the horror genre and almost always directed at women.
Justine Triet’s legal drama Anatomy of a Fall (2023) has its central death recreated but never witnessed. Accused of her husband’s alleged murder, Sandra (Sandra Hüller) stands trial and is picked apart in public to the point where anything she says or does can be used to attack her credibility, including her status as a German immigrant living in France. Similarly, Çatak has Nowak dissected by the school newspaper and further draws on her Polish heritage as a negative to her detractors and the reason she defends a child of Turkish heritage accused of stealing with no evidence.
Initially a tricky film to get financed, Çatak was forced to make the project small, compact and thus The Teachers’ Lounge became a taught, distilled entity, free of any bulk or the trappings a larger budget may have added. A lauded screening at Berlin Film Festival in early 2023 saw a fire sale as territories were rightly snapped up and the film went onto critical and awards success. On the surface, The Teachers’ Lounge is a film about community, education and politics. It is not a thriller. Yet it has the pulsing, paranoiac heart and edge-of-your-seat suspense of one.
The Teachers' Lounge is released in UK & Irish cinemas on 11 April through Curzon.
© Curzon