The Teachers’ Lounge (PG13)
98 minutes, opens on Jan 18 exclusively at The Projector
4 stars
The story: Germany’s 2024 Academy Awards submission for best international feature is set in a German middle school, where an idealistic teacher’s investigations into a spate of petty campus thefts have spiralling consequences.
School is a microcosm of contemporary society, with all its ideological stressors, in German director Ilker Catak’s tense and provocative moral drama The Teachers’ Lounge.
Young new hire Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) advocates fairness. She is protective of the accused pupil (Can Rodenbostel), a son of Turkish immigrants, and appalled by her fellow teachers pressuring the pre-teen kids to snitch on one another.
To decisively identify the thief, she leaves her jacket in the teachers’ lounge with her laptop camera on. The trouble starts when a staff member (Eva Lobau), the mother of her pet student (Leonard Stettnisch), is filmed taking the money from Nowak’s pocket.
Allegations and denials fly. Anger and suspicions are stoked.
It is immaterial who the perpetrator is. The 2023 German Film Awards’ best film is about the fragility of social order and how quickly a system can unravel from a minor incident.
The allegory is a nerve-wracking psychological thriller as Nowak finds herself caught in the competing dynamics of race, rebellion, censorship, bad decisions, misinformation and groupthink, and vilified by students, parents and colleagues.
The high-minded heroine, with her self-satisfied air of superiority, is not easy to like, anyway.
The exceptional performance by Benesch shows Nowak’s certitude being stripped away – the panic is in her startled eyes. The movie is confined entirely within the institution, where she is pursued down the hallways by an urgent handheld camera and a soundtrack of screeching violins while paranoia compresses around her.
Hot take: Top marks to this classroom parable for making a complex lesson on modern ethics so intensely suspenseful.
The End We Start From (NC16)
102 minutes, opens on Jan 18
3 stars
The story: Water breaking carries grave significance for an expectant mother played by Jodie Comer, who goes into labour alone in her East London townhouse just as the city is submerged by massive floods.
The End We Start From has neither effects-driven spectacle nor action heroics.
This British eco-disaster drama dispenses with genre conventions for an intimate, almost introspective, solitary survival journey of the woman referred to simply as Mother.
At first, she evacuates with her husband (Joel Fry) to her in-laws’ (Mark Strong and Nina Sosanya) country house up north. But food is soon depleted, and the couple become separated in the nationwide chaos.
Things are not all bad, since she gets to meet Hollywood heart-throb Benedict Cumberbatch: He cameos as a kind stranger and is the movie’s producer.
She also finds temporary solidarity with another single mum (a superb Katherine Waterston).
She is otherwise left on her own to fend for her newborn, trekking across the muddy landscape and numerous dangers to a shelter and then, when that is overrun by looters, to an island commune.
It is a slim story. The 2017 dystopian novella of the same title by British author Megan Hunter ran a mere 160 pages, and the adaptation, the feature directing debut of Mahalia Belo, rests wholly on Comer’s resolute and sensitive portrayal of motherhood in a narrative that is troubling for its everyday recognisability: Did England not begin 2024 with extreme flooding?
Climate change is already a reality, and Mother could be any mother fighting to rebuild today’s devastated world for the next generation.
Hot take: About time someone elevated Comer to movie lead. The Emmy winner from the BBC series Killing Eve (2018 to 2022) strongly centres a modest but resonant apocalyptic fable.
