An idealistic young teacher who seeks to protect her students finds the situation spiralling out of control when a series of petty thefts from the teachers’ lounge leads to increasingly fraught investigations and confrontations with colleagues and parents.

Ilker Çatak’s third feature film is a taut thriller with a jangling, anxiety-laden soundtrack, but it rises above mere entertainment in its exploration of the simmering emotions and petty resentments at work not only in the classroom but in the eponymous common room, the teachers’ safe space. 

Racism, class bigotry and misogyny all rear their ugly heads, but at the heart of the story is a young woman, terrifically played by Leonie Benesch, whose attempts to do the right thing by everybody simply make matters worse.

The film was Germany’s entry for the Academy Awards Best International Feature Film in 2023.

“Ilker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge falls into a category of films best described as ­‘everyday thrillers’. Recently we’ve had Boiling Point (2021) and Full Time (2022), but the tradition stretches back at least as far as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). These are films in which characters fight not for their lives but for their livelihoods: ­desperately working to keep their jobs, their families and their ­integrity intact.” Catherine Wheatley, Sight and Sound

“Like Laurent Cantet’s The Class, the school serves as a microcosm, with wider world issues of racial profiling and socioeconomic divisions playing out in miniature. But it works both ways, with a mirror image of playground politics reflected in the mean-girl manoeuvring in the staff room.” Wendy Ide, Observer.