A secondary school spirals into blame, anger and rebellion in İlker Çatak’s tense and morally nuanced film, Germany’s submission for best international feature at the Oscars this year. Leonie Benesch is excellent as Carla Nowak, a new teacher contending with a spate of thefts. The head instigates a heavy-handed search of wallets, and a Turkish boy in Frau Nowak’s seventh-grade class is suspected. That, to her disgust, seems to be racially motivated.
Nowak is soon on the receiving end of a theft, and thinks that she has caught the culprit in the staff room on her laptop webcam. The woman concerned, Friederike Kuhn (Eva Löbau), who works in the school office, fiercely denies her guilt, accusing Nowak in turn of violating her privacy by recording secretly. The escalating situation pits Nowak against Kuhn, parents, teaching colleagues and her star pupil, who happens to be Kuhn’s son. And that’s before the involvement of the school newspaper, an army of mini Woodward and Bernsteins with the scent of a scoop in their nostrils.
Çatak, who wrote the screenplay with Johannes Duncker, has built an intricate, flammable nest of plotlines, dangling half-clues that may or may not be relevant. Does ethnicity come into it — Nowak has Polish heritage — or class, given that Kuhn is looked down on by some of the teachers? The tedium, friction and claustrophobia of school life are finely evoked, but this story, with its echoes of The Crucible and Michael Haneke’s Hidden, isn’t just about the world inside the school gates. Polarisation, post-truth, the accelerated rush to indignation — all of it will be depressingly familiar. Nowak seems to be a decent person acting honourably, but others think differently. Çatak resists neat answers, and Benesch anchors the film with a performance of contained subtlety.
★★★★☆
12A, 98min
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