Critics reviews

What’s really fascinating here isn’t how dark the film gets, but how effectively Gyllenhaal and Colangelo establish Lisa’s isolation, how at odds her behavior is with normal ways of being, even before she goes fully through the looking glass.

Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.

Even though Lisa makes us recoil in horror, Gyllenhaal, with her courageous vulnerability and her evident compassion and understanding for her character, turns The Kindergarten Teacher into much more than a morality tale.

A different outsider emerges in “The Kindergarten Teacher,” a remake of an Israeli film about a woman who comes to believe that one of her students is a prodigy. Directed by Sara Colangelo, this version doesn’t have the merciless political bite of the original, but it does star an excellent Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Despite the cultural divide, both films find the beauty and urgency in poetry. Unlike Lapid, who wrote the poems that appear in his film, Colangelo—a poetry lover but not necessarily a poet—tapped immigrant poets Ocean Vuong and Kaveh Akbar to pen some poignant verse.