Every year, schoolteacher Mária Drazdechová (Zuzana Mauréry) welcomes a new class of pupils into her homeroom; however, she is less interested in them as individuals than in what their parents do and what they can do for her. As the local chairwoman of the Communist Party and the widow of a Russian officer, "Comrade Teacher" has parents doing her hair, waiting in line at the grocers in the morning (with the grocer saving choice meats and vegatables for her), and even smuggling gifts to her sister in Moscow on the airlines while the students drop by to clean her house and run errands. When parents see her as a "communist pig" rather than a feudal lord, it is the children who suffer, with young, precocious gymnast Danka (Tamara Fischer) told that her talents are more physical than intellectual and either not given the opportunity to prove herself or having her presentations undermined by the teacher. When Blinder (Martin Havelka) refuses to be the teacher's on-call handyman, his son Filip (Oliver Oswald) is kept from attending wrestling after school by detention and errands. Their classmates, both the favored ones and those who like to make others feel small in general, aide their "punishment" with bullying and sabotaging efforts. When one of them cracks under the extreme stress, the parents file a complaint, and the head teacher thinks it is worth the risk to convene a parent-teacher conference to discusses a petition to file a formal complaint with the school and the party. The parents prove just as willing to look the other way so long as their children do well - even threatening to use their own social positions against the dissenters - while others are cowed into withdrawing their objections, but the commonality of private experiences starts to shift the tide; however, those with the most evidence against the teacher may also be the most compromised. Forget the various BAD TEACHER films, THE TEACHER is as amusing as it is insidious in its examination of the abuse of power in degrees and those who let it happen so long as they profit as well - particularly when they can shrug off what they sacrifice as an extentsion of their professional obligations or just not a big deal - or are shielded from unwanted attention. It is perhaps fitting that even when the parents try to do the right thing, it is behind each others' backs and a childish prank by one of the victimized students proves much more effective in neutralizing the threat (at least for a time).