Michelle Torian and Clayton Royal Johnson in Teacher’s Pet (2025)
Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Noam Kroll
Teacher’s Pet goes back to school and follows Clara, an overachieving foster care teenager who has become the target of a serial killer masquerading as a substitute teacher. The characters are compelling, even if the plot has some blind spots regarding distinctive red flags that should have exposed the villain’s deception.
Teacher’s Pet takes the bold move of revealing the killer’s nature to the audience from the opening credits. The prevailing tension hinges on whether the other characters can discern the dramatic irony. Do they recognize the danger that the viewers already know? If you remove the prologue, would the reveal of a serial killer in the course of the story make the movie more compelling? Maybe.
A more conventional approach would be to introduce hints about the serial killer as the movie unfolds. This allows the audience to see the odd behavior shift from eccentric and overly helpful to dangerous. That way the audience is still guessing whether the suspected oddball is truly a threat or not. Fortunately, the performances are strong enough that we can let the dramatic irony run.
The Cast of Teacher’s Pet
- Michelle Torian plays Clara, a high school senior on the precipice of attending Yale. She is a foster teen who is an outsider in her wealthy prep school. Clara’s life has given her a tough and independent outlook.
- Luke Barnett plays Mr. Heller, a serial killer masquerading as a substitute English Teacher in Clara’s senior high school English class. He is also in the habit of killing people to exorcise evil.
- Clayton Royal Johnson plays Zach, Clara’s best friend. He is a son of wealth and privilege, and is the high school drug dealer.
- Barbara Crampton plays Sylvia, Clara’s foster mother. Sylvia has become a foster parent for the right reasons, as she loves the kids she fosters. Her relationship with Clara is strained due to Clara’s intellectual prowess.
- Kevin Makely plays Jack, Clara’s foster father. He is a foster parent for the money. He is also short-tempered and abusive. His relationship with Clara is abusive.
- Sara Tomko plays Mrs. Estrada, a counselor at the high school. She is one of the first people to pick up the warnings of something amiss.
- Drew Powell plays Detective Sommers, brought in to investigate the trail of evidence that Heller has left behind.
A Synopsis of Teacher’s Pet
As graduation nears for Clara and her classmates, they receive the disturbing news that their English Teacher had committed suicide, and they will have a new instructor. Mr. Heller, a Yale graduate himself, is a bookish man who asks the class to express their thoughts on the late Mr. Abbott by writing a freestyle essay. He has all the earmarks of a literary scholar, but in reality, he is a predatory deviant. And he has targeted Clara as his object of obsession.
It becomes clear that Clara is Heller’s favorite student, and he asks her to be his teaching assistant. It’s a little awkward, but it turns out to be a legitimate request. She helps him prepare the syllabus and curriculum. Things begin to turn when Clara and Zach find a body in the meadow where they go to hang out in private. This is one of Heller’s victims, but they have no idea who is responsible.
At the same time, Clara’s foster parents request that Clara lie to Child Welfare in stating that she will be living with them for two more years, until she is twenty. She refuses and ends up getting beaten by Jack. It’s a tough time for Clara, and it’s about to get a whole lot worse as Heller’s obsessions intensify and he begins to manipulate her life. Between the abuse at home and the threats from school, will she even make it out of High School?
Evaluation
The cat-and-mouse game between Heller and Clara is fairly engrossing. Barnett, in particular, is a compelling watch. He is both believably a literate man, who loves teaching English, and he is also clearly a sicko. The obsession starts modestly and then grows to overt raw manipulation. Torian, a talented up-and-coming young actress, allows Clara to play her cards carefully. Her scholarship is not a foregone conclusion, so she can’t afford to overreact to borderline awkwardness. She is also playing the system, trying to get favor from the instructor.
By the time Heller reveals his tyrannical side, she is in too deep. He has complete leverage on her. However, the attempts to flesh out Heller’s backstory feel clumsy or underdeveloped. His motivations are only hinted at. He does have envelopes labelled “Expel Evil”, but that feels like shorthand for plotting and scheming.
The authorities in this movie are also blind to obvious criminal activities. The principal and counselor are slow to pick up clues. The police don’t seem to be doing sufficient detective work, and so it comes down to a classic final girl vs. psycho killer for the win. To that extent, this is a fairly mainstream thriller. The violence isn’t particularly fearsome, and though Heller is a creep, he’s not chill-inducing.
Noam Kroll, in true independent filmmaker tradition, handled almost every aspect of this movie: Writing, directing, editing, and cinematography. He assembled a solid cast and coaxed some fine performances from them. Kroll wrote the main character relationships well. I would have appreciated a clearer explanation of how Heller obtained the position he attained fraudulently, as well as more direct confrontations with the powers that be. Heller managed to skate through despite some pretty sketchy behavior.
Closing Thoughts
With those caveats, if you enjoy thrillers, this would be a fine watch on a lazy Saturday Evening. As school horror/thrillers go, the movie put the schoolwork in the foreground. The relationship between Clara and Heller felt earned. Watching Clara navigate her situation, fearing more for her academic standing than for her life was enjoyable. At what point would you lash back at someone who holds your future in their hands? Similarly, Heller ratcheting up the pressure is also engrossing. Clara’s counter-manipulation at the movie’s climax feels appropriate, too.
To reiterate my opening thoughts, I’m 50/50 as to whether they should have shown the serial killing to start the movie. The way the plot is structured, however, an audience that is halfway paying attention would have figured out the threads… though Jack and Zach might have made decent red herrings.
A note to Barbara Crampton fans: she has a medium-sized role in this film, and she does a nice job with it. However, she is neither a featured character nor a mere cameo. Barbara, now that she produces and distributes films, has been very busy performing in bit roles throughout the genre recently. However, she is not distributing this film… at least not yet.
Teacher’s Pet was shown at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is not rated by the MPAA, but it would likely be in the PG-13 rating range. It appears that this movie is early in its festival run, as it finished production in June of this year, and does not have a distributor yet. Fair warning, there are several movies titled ‘Teacher’s Pet’ out there, and it is not currently available.