“The Teachers’ Lounge” (2023), originally “Das Lehrerzimmer,” follows Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), a new Polish teacher working at a contemporary German school. After one of her students faces theft accusations, she decides to solve the case herself. Despite her painfully good intentions, she exacerbates the problem and puts herself in the glare of the spotlight. This film is one of my top five films in 2023.

Benesch and cowriter and director Ilker Catak make a great team. They make the viewer feel as if they can see Carla’s thought process, her professional motivations, and her personal reactions. Carla is constantly calculating what the right thing is, but it changes from second to second and often leads to someone, if not everyone, feeling wronged in some way. If Carla had an ounce of self-preservation, she could achieve a satisfying outcome, but for instance, when she starts to make leeway with a student who transgresses, she is duty bound to correct and reverse any progress.

There is never a point when Carla appears to be acting in bad faith, which is the key to enjoying this movie. She is no Iago pot stirrer trying to sow discord. Carla is sincere and earnest believing that she knows the best way to proceed. When Catak depicts her first class, he uses the soundtrack to make her seem like a conductor of an orchestra as if she has complete control over her environment. It is not until later in the film that Catak signals that Carla is subjective and an unreliable narrator when she starts to hallucinate and imagines everyone wearing the same shirt, a pivotal plot point in “The Teachers’ Lounge.” Given how the movie unfolds, it was plausible that everyone bought and wore the shirt to protest, but they are walking around normally so it becomes obvious that Carla is freaking out. She has panic attacks, and by the end of the movie, she is under no illusions of how tenuous her teaching skills are. Teaching is like dancing. It only works if the other person consents to the leader.

When Carla accuses Friederike Kuhn (Eva Lobau), a school administrator and mother of one of her students, the second of her two possible suspects, she does not anticipate Kuhn’s reaction because the proof appears damning. Kuhn does not shield her son, Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) from her emotional reaction. “The Teachers’ Lounge” never reveals who was responsible for the thefts so only Catak and cowriter Johannes Duncker know whether Kuhn’s emotional reaction is human or DARVO: deny, accuse, and reverse victim and offender. It is easy to criticize from the sidelines how Kuhn should act by emotionally regulating herself instead of being so open about her distress because it leads to Oskar having trouble in school. Kuhn is the embodiment of hurt people, hurt people, and she tries to lash out at Carla in public as often as possible, which sucks more children and their parents into the drama. Kuhn seems unperturbed by the effect that any of this has on her son because she is so consumed with her own pain and lashing out at Carla. Oskar becomes a weapon in her arsenal. The fallout spreads beyond Kuhn and Oskar, and no one is learning in this environment except about toxic workplaces.

There are two teachers, Thomas Liebenwerda (Michael Klammer) and Vanessa Konig (Sarah Bauerett), who annoy Carla because they seem to care more about protecting themselves than the students. They interrupt her virtual meetings, ask invasive questions, make reckless accusations, then when Carla gets invested in the conversation, they walk away. By the end of “The Teachers’ Lounge,” they seem concerned and like possible natural allies except they are everything that Carla does not want to be: a person who does not put the children first. Of course, they are also not at the center of a firestorm so maybe she should attend their TED Talk. Milosz Dudek (Rafael Stachowiak), a fellow Polish ex pat and the school administrator who does damage control, does not play as pivotal role as expected, but the narrative comes from Carla’s point of view. She does not lean on the officials who should oversee the investigation and stick to teaching. Carla fails at her one job.

The school becomes a microcosm of all societal ills: racism, xenophobia, parentification, freedom of speech, right to privacy, security. It is not long before kids are using genetics to accuse classmates of criminal behavior and yikes, Godwin’s Law, especially since it is a German film! “The Teachers’ Lounge” is such a good film that it really feels as if it could happen even though the staging takes it to operatic extremes. It is in many ways a daytime horror film, a thriller without weapons or death. The film’s lighting verges on overexposed and has a cold, steel blue sheen to it. The film is filled with chaotic emotions, but the setting is clinical, exposed and lacks any warmth. This lighting communicates that this environment is not nurturing, but the equivalent of a police station or a bureaucracy, which leads to a lot of showdowns. Even the kids feel like hardboiled detectives, and Carla is the suspect.

Other than the horrific history between Poland and German, “The Teachers’ Lounge” could be making a statement about the uneasy relationship between Polish and German people, but it got lost in translation to this US viewer. Is Carla a German Polish person? It is obvious that she and Dudek share a bond, and Carla takes great pains to discourage speaking her mother tongue after witnessing the principal’s reaction to a Turkish family speaking amongst themselves with German speakers present. She may not be facing as serious implicit bias as Turkish immigrants, but it is unclear what the film was trying to convey. As part of the European Union, it is normal for Polish people, regardless of their German ancestry, to move to Germany, but do they face stigma or are they accepted? Dudek even asks if she is ashamed. Her response feels less as if she is worried about bias, but more about learning a new rule regarding what is appropriate behavior and integrated it without questioning it.

Also during the second viewing, I wondered if Carla is supposed to be a queer coded character. Before events get out of control, Carla hangs out with the school counselor, Lore Semnik (Kathrin Wehlisch), and Lore is the only person that Carla treats like a human being, not a colleague whom she holds at arms’ length. Also when students interview Carla, she gives a lengthier version of the “It gets better” message. She also serves as the gym teacher. It may also explain her Herculean threshold for acceptance of others even as they hurt her.

In other semiotic possibilities, Klammer is an Italian actor, but he appears to present to this American as a Black or mixed man. There is a phenomenon which I have only seen in American films such as “Concussion” (2015) or “Dark Waters” (2019) where a Black character says the overtly unpopular, biased thing that the majority is thinking so a character who represents the majority can rebuke the Black character. It is a way to assuage guilt by othering bad behavior as if the majority has not baked that prejudice into the system. It also serves a double function to stigmatize and attack a Black character without fear of accusations of racism. This dynamic is turned on its head with Liebenwarda because “The Teachers’ Lounge” shows the impact that accusations of racism have on the character and rehabilitates Liebenwarda as a good teacher willing to put aside personal grievances to help a student and Carla. Liebenwarda is depicted as a dedicated professional thus moving away from Carla’s initial impressions of him as a danger to her and the students.

2023 is a year with a lot of movies about the tension between students and teachers with students as the Teachers’ persecutors: Koreeda Hirokazu’s “Monster” (2023), “About Dry Grasses” (2023) and to a lesser extreme with a happy ending, “The Holdovers” (2023). There is a relatable collective anxiety over children having a degree of power over adults without the maturity to wield that power judiciously. All these films reflect that the children remain vulnerable to adult decisions, which are not always informed or in their best interest. “The Teachers’ Lounge” is the best because there are no villains or heroes on either side. Adults do not magically have restraint bestowed upon them because of their age. They are occasionally more volatile than the children and always have that capricious power over children. At least, Carla understands her capacity to wreak havoc whereas most adults make a default decision without thinking of long-term effects because it is procedure. The film refuses to take an easy way out. There are no solutions, and damage has been done.

“The Teachers’ Lounge” is not recommended for people who are already at full capacity and are teetering on the edge. If Sandra Huller did not dominate with two showstopping performances, Benesch would be hot on her heels. Watching this film is a stressful experience, but it paints a nuanced portrait of how well-intentioned people can make a mess and instead of dismissing it as unsolvable and ignoring the problem, it elevates quotidian, local problems to the height of the Watergate scandal because for these people, it is. Even if you hate movies with subtitles, this movie transcends the expected formula of good teachers in challenging situation such as “Dangerous Minds” (1995), “Lean on Me” (1989) and “Stand and Deliver” (1988) by denying a happy ending or pat answers to complex societal problems.