The Teacher's Lounge (2023)

This is a quiet yet an intense thriller about things that happen every day. It is very difficult to watch, but in the way that very uncomfortable things happen. The teacher at the center of this is Carla Nowak, a Polish emigre teaching math and physical education. She’s an idealist about education and the obligation of citizens to look out for each other. She’s a do-gooder, mostly in a constructive way. When one her kids gets hauled out of class to be accused of stealing, Carla has to sit in on a conference with the boy and his parents as they explain that they gave him the money so he could buy a videogame and suggest that it’s racism (they’re Turkish) that put them in this humiliating predicament. It seems like a convincing explanation. Carla believes it. But the event deepens her fear of theft. The next time she’s on break in the teachers’ lounge and has to leave it, she keeps her laptop open with the video camera secretly running. When she returns, she finds some cash missing from the wallet she left in her inside coat pocket. A check of the recording shows somebody taking money from her wallet while she was out of the room. Then things start to fall apart. Carla loses control in a lot of ways, most of which we can identify with, and the movie spirals in a very uncomfortable direction. It is a story of unintended consequences, where some have regrets and others are collateral damage.