At first glance, Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal), is an ideal tutor.
She chops vegetables for snacks. She treads softly between her charges during naptime. In her sing-song voice, she coaxes one more snake curved letter from the class before break.
At home, there are few screaming matches.
Her college-age son’s interest in the military causes some discord and Lisa scolds her teenage daughter for a lack of imagination when the latter is caught with a joint. Her husband (Chernus) seems kind and supportive.
Yet there’s a strange, silent malaise around the house.
Lisa’s yearning for something more than middle-class comfort is etched across her face as she attends an adult-education poetry course she takes after work, led by a charismatic professor (Gael Garcia Bernal).
But her poems are dismissed as derivative and lacking voice by fellow-students.
With the preciousness of artistic talent already in mind, Lisa overhears one of her own students, a precocious five-year-old named Jimmy (Parker Sevak), recite a poem, which is rapturously received at poetry class when she passes it off as her own composition.
That’s a little cringe-making, but it’s merely an amuse-bouche for the spiralling, toe-curling obsession that follows. Lisa has decided that little Jimmy is a prodigy and she’s going to do everything she can to nurture his talent against a soul-crushing world.
She takes him on impromptu excursions; she goes to see Jimmy’s uncle; she persuades the family to get rid of Jimmy’s current nanny (Rosa Salazar) for treating Jimmy “like a child”.
Gyllenhaal’s soft, measured speech patterns and her character’s genuine passion for art and beauty, make for a fiendishly ambivalent film that segues from poetry appreciation and mid-life crisis drama into flinching thriller.
Adapting a 2014 Israeli film of the same name, Sara Colangelo keeps a similarly cool head, never allowing for histrionics.
Forget bunny boiling: the titular heroine’s actions may be wildly inappropriate but The Kindergarten Teacher never rules out the possibility that she may just be onto something.
