Movies: The Penguin Lessons

Grieve losing what you love, this 2025 Sony Pictures Classics film depicts with humor

Sony’s UK movie poster

Losing your highest values depletes, tests and tries the soul, The Penguin Lessons dramatizes with humor, charm and a little bird. This poignant movie about the role of a bird in one man’s life begins with a drop of paint, jettisoned by his shudder from a bomb explosion during arrival to teach boys at an academy in a South American dictatorship in 1976. Steve Coogan (Philomena) portrays the English teacher.

Jonathan Pryce, warning Coogan’s instructor to be politically correct, plays the principal. Add Coogan’s character’s jaunt to the beach with a potential one night stand and you end up with the rescued bird that becomes the teacher’s pet.

Besides the penguin, a patio, a heartbroken friend, unruly boys for the requisite trouble in the classroom, lessons in Shakespeare, Shelley and science—after waking to military march music every morning on the radio—and a feisty housekeeper make this easygoing story about a man and his unusual keep a rare, enjoyable message of love. The Penguin Lessons, neither as quirky nor as sentimental as might be supposed, gingerly lets the audience enjoy learning, humor and surprise.

Being subversive against the police state rarely gets a softer focus than it does here in this Sony Pictures Classics movie based on a teacher’s memoir. The last act gets an A plus. As the penguin charms Coogan’s compliant teacher, whose reason for coming to the continent for Nazi refugees remains obscured, the academy’s servants and locals stir up trouble in proximity to the powers that be. Though not entirely authentic to 1976, The Penguin Lessons affords gentle and refined wisdom.

The Full Monty director and Philomena screenwriter Peter Cattaneo’s direction of Coogan’s troubled teacher in transition delivers some beautiful filmmaking; notice whether he stops joking at the penguin and when comes the affection. Behold the beauty of knowing natural facts and a sight of the species, which come tenderly into play with the movie’s theme about grief. Redemption with swimming, sunshine and enlightenment from one of his students—before the wind stirs branches and leaves to a piano-laden score—achieves an elegy and upturn to cherishing the loved one you’ve lost. An apology scene features some of the best acting I’ve seen. Coogan is powerful and honest. The writing’s excellent. The scene is perfect.

Indeed, The Penguin Lessons is a perfect tonic depicting recovery from loss—it is earned, it is resolved, and it is, if briefly, brilliant with a single sentence of writing for the screen that shows an understanding of what one gains from grief—without making light of what’s been lost—or making a triumph of what’s been gained.

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