Movie Review: The Teachers Lounge

The new movie "The Teachers Lounge" is not for any young person on the fence about becoming a school teacher. The entire world knows that being a teacher is one of the most noble and important professions any person can aspire to. The world also knows that teachers are grossly underpaid and disrespected even though a good teacher can change lives and a great teacher can save lives. The Teachers lounge is a foreign film from Germany with subtitles, but despite this I did not mind reading the dialogue.

The screenplay for this movie seems to hit all the important points about being an employee/teacher of a high school. Arguably a school teacher must endure all of the backstabbing and bad people that any typical employee has to live within any company. Schoolteachers, also have to deal with the same company politics, and injustice expected of an employee and additionally must also deal with difficult students, some who can be violent, bullying, and trying to help other students with learning disabilities.

The story of The Teachers Lounge starts with some students stealing, and then a member of the faculty is accused of stealing money from the wallet of teacher Carla Nowak, played very well by Leonie Benesch. What follows is an investigation and the forced temporary suspension of the teacher accused of stealing, Friederike Kuhn played by Eva Löbau. Kuhn's son, who is a student at the school and in Nowak's class, takes his mother's suspension and accusations of stealing very hard. Worse is the young boy's learning problems and bullying in the school from other students about his mother.

All of this human conflict is both written and performed extremely well, with an ultimate final resolution that nobody would ever expect for me was not strong enough given the quality of this story and was too abrupt.

Most interesting about this movie is the Rotten Tomatoes rating at an extremely high 97% from the critics with the moviegoing audience ranking this film a low 55%, with my rating about 80%. With a better ending, I would have ranked this film 90% due to the strong story and acting. However, I do recommend this movie.