A Teacher

Morally, a mess. In every other way, unremarkable. It's troublesome to me that this story was made not once but twice.

Quite sublime acting by Nick Robinson who's new to me. He has great boyish charm and senses the tone of every scene perfectly. But the show isn't special: we all have our minds made up about how unethical this is and so has the creator of this show, altho thankfully she didn't monsterize the teacher. It's quite a long, depressing ordeal. More interesting and daring would have been to explore what (sexually) attracts people to these stories. That the real thing's often devastating, we know it

Mara and Robinson are terrific, bringing a depth, soul and passion to their characters that the screenplay can't match - it is an interesting idea to present Mara's teacher as an irrational/inexplicable character, but it makes the drama ring hollow and forces the viewer into a position of empathising with her heinous actions without context as to "why" Mara acts the way she does. An underdeveloped subplot about "sins of the father" awkwardly introduced into the climactic episodes doesn't help.

Starts bad, with a touch of morbid curiosity, and only gets worse from there. The A24 'flat-color' look and some naturalistic performances cannot save this series from its own narrative mess, which comes off as the writer's halfhearted attempt to denounce her own improper interests. A queasy, ultimately quite boring exercise.