Clocking in at a wispy 75 minutes, Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher tells a story as blunt and unadorned as its title. Diana Watts (Lindsay Burdge) teaches English at a high school somewhere in Texas. She’s having an affair with one of her students, an affable but fairly empty-headed rich kid named Eric (Will Brittain). There’s no indication that the two are soulmates stuck in an untenable situation, and it’s clear that Eric simply gets off on the traditional hot-for-teacher fantasy. Diana, however, believes she’s in love. At any rate, she needs Eric with an intensity that threatens to dismantle the minimal reserves of common sense and self-preservation she has remaining. This can’t possibly end well, and it doesn’t… in slow motion. Content merely to observe a disaster in the making—one with consequences that are readily apparent right from the jump—A Teacher feels a bit like watching some fool cross a busy freeway on foot over and over again for an hour and change. There’s little to do but await the inevitable splat.
Fidell’s smartest move is structural: She begins the film with the affair already in progress, never depicting how it began. Not only does this approach avoid certain clichés, it lends the scenario, which is otherwise so basic that it flirts with being generic, a much-needed element of mystery. In the same spirit, both Fidell’s script and Burdge’s performance suggest that Diana is screwed up in ways that go well beyond this particular transgression. A brief visit from Diana’s brother (Jonny Mars) vaguely alludes to family issues and psychological problems—he’s openly worried about her, despite knowing nothing of the hole she’s currently digging herself—but the film wisely declines to elaborate. Instead, Fidell lets Burdge’s expressive face, with its sharp angles and penetrating gaze, convey the character’s inner turmoil, with unnecessary assists from Brian McOmber’s atonal score and a few hackneyed slow-motion interludes. Oh, and jogging. When in doubt, cut to Diana jogging toward the camera, as if desperately trying to outrun her failings.
A Teacher’s biggest problem, however, is its essential skimpiness. Its running time is unusually short, yet it feels padded and repetitive, a continual restatement of the obvious; at no point does the film confound, or even notably complicate, any expectations created by the statutory-rape scenario. (Americans view said scenario very differently when the adult is female and the child is male, rather than vice versa, but the movie never addresses that, even implicitly.) Burdge and Brittain lack the chemistry that might have made their relationship queasily fascinating for its own sake, and supporting characters like Diana’s roommate, Sophia (Jennifer Prediger), exist solely to fulfill various plot functions. Even the sex scenes are ho-hum, with none of the awkward self-consciousness that often occurs between cross-generational lovers. In short, there isn’t not much movie here. Fidell and Burdge both have talent; maybe next time they can find a less routine context in which to show it off.