Ìlker Çatak’s new film is a nerve-janglingly painful and intense movie about an outbreak of stealing in a German secondary school. The uncompromising qualities initially coexist with something subtly insidious and unresolved, an unnerving demonstration of poisoned-herd mentality, all underscored by a disquieting musical score. This then gives away to a sort of melodrama which is less powerful and more generic. The dramatic tendons of the film slacken a little in its third act and I wondered if screenwriters Çatak and Johannes Duncker were sure how exactly to finish their story. Yet it hooks into the mind.
Leonie Benesch (who played Prince Philip’s ill-fated sister Cecile in The Crown) is Carla Nowak, a young, idealistic teacher of maths and PE at a school in which pupils are encouraged to think of themselves with something akin to citizens’ rights. Carla is smart and committed: a fluent speaker of English and also Polish; she comes from a Polish family in Westphalia, and is a little uneasy about her own otherness.
