The Penguin Lessons

“The Penguin Lessons comes off as well-meaning but wrong-footed.”

Title: The Penguin Lessons (2025)
Director: Peter Cattaneo 👨🏼🇬🇧
Writers: Jeff Pope 👨🏼🇬🇧 based on the book by Tom Michell 👨🏼🇬🇧

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 3.25/5

Peter Cattaneo’s The Penguin Lessons, based on the memoir by Tom Michell, passes the time like a light beach read. On its face, it follows British teacher Michell (Steve Coogan) who reluctantly acquires a penguin and cares for it, learning lessons along the way, of course. But under this fluffy exterior lies a horrifying backdrop of Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, when residents were cruelly kidnapped, imprisoned, and murdered at any whiff of supposed political dissent.

A more sophisticated film might successfully weave the two threads together, but it’s clear that Cattaneo prefers to linger on the cheerier material of one man’s transformation and the quirky, true events of an adopted penguin. In the film’s defense, this echoes the path taken by Michell’s book. Regardless, Jeff Pope’s script feels uneasy with itself, incorporating the kidnap of a supporting character yet keeping the uglier details of her imprisonment at arm’s length. Much like the movie’s posh setting of St. George’s College in Buenos Aires, grittier realism is kept beyond the gates—as out of sight, and out of mind, as possible. The story doesn’t entirely plug its ears to the turmoil of the time, which would have felt oblivious, but The Penguin Lessons does beg for more attention to the weightier subjects it chooses to introduce.

Gender: 2.5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Fitting for an adaptation of a man’s memoir, The Penguin Lessons focuses on the male protagonist, Michell. It also takes place at a private school that skews heavily male. (St. George’s College had only begun admitting girls in 1975, one year prior to the film’s events.)

A couple of women do have supporting roles. Sofía (Alfonsina Carrocio) and her grandmother María (Vivian El Jaber) work as cleaners at the school and act as moral compasses for Michell. But even when the women share scenes, they only direct their dialogue towards Michell, never with each other. In addition, Michell has a brief love interest, Carina (Micaela Breque), who he meets on holiday in Uruguay. These female characters collectively pull the apathetic and cynical Michell in a more humane direction, but have little depth themselves.

Race: 2.25/5

Despite a story about a white Englishman teaching Latin American students through unconventional methods, The Penguin Lessons manages to avoid more obvious “white savior” land mines that past films like Dangerous Minds (1995) readily stepped on. And thankfully, cringey casting isn’t a problem (we’re looking at you, Emilia Pérez): Argentinian and Uruguayan characters are played by actors from the region. For example, Sofía is played by Uruguayan actor Carrocio, while María and Carina are played by Argentinians.

But that’s where the positives peter out. There remains nothing fresh about a movie that centers around a white man in a “foreign” setting. In The Penguin Lessons, Argentinians turn into mere background noise. They’re rambunctious-turned-adoring students, or spirited locals like Sofía and María, who lack personhood outside of how Michell views them.

Furthermore, the film’s approach to this harrowing period feels glib. A lovable penguin receives more emotional heft than a title card that simply states how “an estimated 30,000 ‘Disappeared’ people remain unaccounted for.” Although Pope tries to highlight the brutality of this era through the subplot of a supporting character getting snatched off the street in broad daylight, his script diverts its attention to “uplifting” moments: when the character’s family marches in protest, or when the prisoner eventually returns, visibly shaken but with no screen time invested in her well-being after that. By treating Operation Condor’s atrocities with kid gloves, The Penguin Lessons fails to adequately acknowledge its setting and its people.

Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.67/5

It’s difficult to balance a gruesome time in history with a heartwarming, gently comedic story about a penguin and its acerbic caretaker. Cattaneo’s The Penguin Lessons veers too far into the latter arena, when crucial social context could’ve easily been added with an extra title card or two. Sans proper grounding, and further destabilized by its shallow portrayals of women and Latin American characters, The Penguin Lessons ultimately comes off as well-meaning but wrong-footed.

Like The Penguin Lessons? Try these other films with animal sidekicks.

Grade: CLiMarch 19, 2025