The Teachers' Lounge

This is a bold film that uses not a child vampire, as in Abigail, in cinemas now, but real children, and the adults charged with their care...

It's incredibly tense... it almost has a Hitchcockian edge.

Benesch is superb, her face a glazed mask of panic as the shockwaves resulting from her actions shake the very foundations of the school.

Çatak resists neat answers, and Benesch anchors the film with a performance of contained subtlety.

A chain-reaction melodrama: acted by self-serious types, scored by tightly wound strings, dependent on characters saying the wrong things and leaving the right ones unsaid with jaws firmly clenched.

It’s a sound lesson in politics – or is it biology? – but more importantly, it’s a chalk-snappingly tense watch.

With its well-meaning and even good teachers such as Nowak, The Teachers’ Lounge shows how even the most innocent decision reverberates with impressionable children.

Mistrust is the thematic glue that holds this nail-biter together. What makes the film so spellbinding is the lack of clear cut right and wrong that exists in this conflict.

The effect is undeniably tense and thrilling, yet one wonders whether the point, which was so splendidly articulated by Jean Vigo in Zéro de conduite, is here stated as soundly and forcefully as it might have been.

A compelling, moody score and an excellent central performance secures this complex schoolroom drama in which an idealistic teacher comes undone, despite the best of intentions