Leonie Benesch (of “The Crown”) performs Carla Nowak, a Polish emigre instructing English and bodily schooling. She’s an idealist about schooling and the duty of residents to look out for one another. She’s a do-gooder—a bit nosy, however principally in a constructive approach. When one her children will get hauled out of sophistication to be accused of stealing (attributable to an nameless tip in regards to the uncommon amount of money he has in his pockets) Carla has to sit down in on a convention with the boy and his dad and mom as they clarify that they gave him the cash so he might purchase a videogame and recommend that it’s racism (they’re Turkish) that put them on this humiliating state of affairs.
It looks like a convincing clarification. Carla believes it. However the occasion solely deepens her emotions of vulnerability, so the subsequent time she’s on break within the lecturers’ lounge and has to go away it, she retains her laptop computer open with the video digital camera secretly operating. When Carla returns, she finds money lacking from her pockets, and a verify of the recording reveals any person taking it whereas she was out of the room.
And it’s right here that the film refines its paranoid thriller aesthetic: simply as you by no means noticed the lodging of the accusation in opposition to the boy, a lot much less whether or not he stole money from any person else, you additionally don’t actually see who stole Carla’s cash, only one sleeve of a shirt with a star sample on it. The identical form of shirt was worn by a staffer working in an workplace just some toes away from the lecturers’ lounge, and he or she might have seen Carla go away the lounge as a result of she had a plain view of it by means of a big plate-glass window. We aspect with Carla when she identifies this lady because the thief as a result of actually, what are the chances that two girls in a not-large faculty wore the identical distinctive shirt that day?
However because the movie goes on and the issues pile up, we begin to doubt our certainty, as does Carla, who shortly begins to want that she’d stored her mouth shut, in regards to the stealing and just about the whole lot else. The staffer that she accused has a boy in her class, and the boy is understandably distraught and offended when his mom is suspended pending an investigation. It seems that he then orchestrates a marketing campaign to defame her within the eyes of his classmates in her dad and mom; I write “seems” as a result of although the boy particularly warns Carla to apologize to his mom or undergo penalties, we aren’t aware about what, if something, he truly did to make good on this promise. All through, Çatak provides us loads of closeups of varied characters that make us assume, “That particular person is mendacity” or “That particular person is a thief” or just “That particular person is once more Carla,” however the film is so firmly rooted in Carla’s point-of-view that we doubt our personal assessments as usually as she does. (Because it seems, Carla put herself in profession jeopardy simply by making the recording: apparently there’s a regulation or rule in opposition to unauthorized private surveillance on the property, and he or she broke it.)