Watch The Teacher

The film is set in 1983. Maria Drazdechova becomes a teacher at one suburban school near Bratislava. She starts to use her position to blackmail parents of her students to get benefits from them. Students whose parents disobey are bullied and are given bad grades. Headmaster of school is afraid to intervene as Drazdechova is a Chairperson of local Communist Party. One of Drazdechova's students commits a suicide attempt as a result of Drazdechova's bullying. This makes the school Principal call the students' parents for a meeting about the petition to remove Drazdechova from school. There are confronted parents whose children were bullied and parents who support Drazdechova. The most of the parents are afraid of Drazdechova's connections and don't want to sign. The meeting is disbanded as only three families sign. It seems that Drazdechova won, but some families then change their mind and start to return to sign the petition. This results in Drazdechova being removed from school.

In 1991, two years after Velvet Revolution Drazdechova becomes a teacher once again. The film concludes with the same scene which it started - Drazdechova asks all her students about their parents' jobs. The only difference is that a portrait on a wall is of Václav Havel, not Gustáv Husák.

The Teacher is a 2017 drama with a runtime of 1 hour and 42 minutes. It has received mostly positive reviews from critics and viewers, who have given it an IMDb score of 7.2 and a MetaScore of 77.