Bird Poets Society.
You might be reeled in by the adorable penguin, but it’s the humanity in The Penguin Lessons that hooks you. Not just the warmth of it in all its flawed and fallible feeling, but the way it survives under pressure, reshaped but stubborn, enduring like a rubber ball in a vice.
In The Penguin Lessons, Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell with the kind of underplayed emotional clarity that British cinema often forgets it can do. He doesn’t perform the numbed disengagement of loss, he lives it – albeit with a faint wince of self-awareness. Jonathan Pryce, all tobacco-tinged authority and weary stiff-upper-lipedness, plays Headmaster Buckle like a man who is aware the world as he knows it is ending, but still clings to the idea that clinging to time-tested ways and studiously ignoring it will see him and his charges through. Their scenes together form the bifurcated heart of a film that dances an Argentinian Tango between compliance and rebellion, but declines the twee route at every opportunity.
What should be a soft-focus tale of an Englishman abroad and a rescued penguin named Juan Salvador instead becomes something sterner, sadder, and far more resonant. Yes, the bird is a delight. No, the film isn’t really about him. It’s about what happens to people when the rules of decency begin to erode, when fear becomes an ambient background noise and morality and legality a matter of plausible deniability. Argentina 1976 is not just a setting – it’s a warning from history to the very present day. The junta’s rise isn’t some footnote in Michell’s story; it’s the drumbeat that undercuts the charm, reminding you that people disappear and no one dares ask questions loudly enough to matter.
Alfonsina Carrocio’s Sofia is the film’s conscience, and when she’s gone, that absence rots in the air like spoiled fruit. Her abduction – brisk, state-sanctioned, unceremonious – is the kind of moment that makes you sit differently in your seat. You realise you’ve seen versions of it replayed in footage from Maryland or Florida, from black SUVs and courthouses and school gates. The United States of 2025 might not be in a declared state of dictatorship, but ask the right people and they’ll tell you: it doesn’t have to be.
Cattaneo lets the darkness creep, not crash. He knows the power of a smile held a second too long, of laughter that cuts off too abruptly. There’s a scene – no spoilers – involving a school assembly and a very unexpected guest, and it walks the line between comedy and grief like a tightrope. Because grief is funny sometimes. Because when fear becomes part of the furniture, you start to brighten up your living spaces with whatever you can.
The film never shouts. It doesn’t lecture. It does gently ask what you’d do with a penguin under your arm and conformity peering over your shoulder. It asks how long before you’d speak up when everyone around you feels silenced. And in that, it feels not just timely but necessary. An elaborated memoir, yes – but one with resonance for the present.
The Penguin Lessons is quiet about its politics but loud about its values. It’s not angry, but it is disappointed – in history, in institutions, in the ease with which normal people can shrug and look the other way. It reminds you, gently but firmly, that sometimes doing the right thing just means refusing to look the other way. And that even now, a scruffy foreigner with a suitcase full of contraband whimsy might be exactly what a poisoned system fears most.
