As everyone who’s ever worked in education knows, dealing with the weans is the least of it. In The Staffroom, new start Anamarija discovers by trial and error the unwritten rules and social hierarchy of her new workplace.

When you think of dramas, there is a tendency to focus on the exceptional – crime and violence, explosive events – but on a day to day basis, people’s highs and lows are much more akin to the drama that plays out in The Staffroom. The clash of personalities, the prickly unspoken backstories, the tension over status and resources, all of which are rarely stated aloud. And especially within a workplace setting, where we are forced to spend a third of our lives, and which we rely on for the ability to feed and house ourselves, the familiarity and mundanity belies the gravity of the stakes involved.

Anamarija is a new school counsellor, but rather this being a film about her helping kids, it shows 90% of her time being absorbed with negotiating the interpersonal dynamics of the teachers and staff. Eager to please at first, she volunteers to help with a school show, having no idea of the quagmire of departmental rivalries she’s stepping into, or the sheer volume of work involved. She then discovers that one of the teachers appears to have mental issues, and is spending all his time in class ranting about a court case he has brought out of paranoid delusion. She flags this up to the principal, whose main priority is of course making the school look good. Too naive to realise she is politely being told to drop it, she takes the principal’s offer to gather evidence for her claim by sitting in on teachers’ classes at random, thus drawing the resentment and suspicion of every member of the teaching staff. Expertly isolated from any peer support, she is in an even weaker position to push any complaint forward.

This is a long game, and the people who play it the best have years of experience and inexhaustible energy. Ana is a novice, and it takes the school year over the course of the film for her to find her feet. The interactions are deftly done and immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with such settings.