The Penguin Lessons (2025) Movie Review

Half historical film and half memoir, The Penguin Lessons is a beautiful look into the friendship between a man and his penguin. 

Set in Argentina in 1976, The Penguin Lessons follows the story of Tom Michell (Steve Coogan, of Joker: Folie à Deux), a British teacher who has just moved to the country to teach at a very prestigious boarding school. In an attempt to impress a woman he likes, Michell ends up saving a penguin from an oil slick where the animal would have perished otherwise. As his friendship with the penguin, his students, and the staff working at the school develop, the main character will also go through a personal and political awakening while the country’s history starts affecting him on a personal level. 

The protagonist of The Penguin Lessons perfectly embodies the uniqueness of British humour, which tends to be, at the same time, both funny and somewhat heartbreaking. This all makes sense when we eventually find out more about Michell’s tragic background in a very melancholic scene that highlights the actor’s incredible performance. The film does a really good job of balancing humour with the more emotional moments, creating a perfect balance between the two. When the intertitles at the end reveal that this is based on a real story, and even show us the home footage that the real Tom Michell found in his house, the entire story becomes even more emotional now that we know that what we have seen on screen is inspired by events that really happened.

I also really like the way that The Penguin Lessons delivers its historical context. Given the film’s setting, the internal politics of Argentina – and South America at large – naturally come into play. The film does a good job at integrating the storyline that has to do with important political events in the country with the personal journey of the main character, even if the two do not come together as naturally as one would have hoped. 

Ultimately, The Penguin Lessons could have been structured a little better from a narrative point of view. The pacing in the second half of the movie slows down significantly after the excitement of the penguin being rescued and smuggled into the school. While the political context becoming more important in the overall storyline of the film should heighten the stakes of the narrative, it ends up doing the opposite as there is still too much distance between the protagonist and the historical moment he is living in. At the same time, the second half of the movie could have been a lot tighter in the second half, which ultimately hurts the overall stakes of the narrative by the end of it.

The scenes set inside the school in The Penguin Lessons are engaging due to the dynamic between the students involved and their characterisation. However, these also end up feeling a bit repetitive, as the context of the school does not change that much throughout the film. They also naturally seem too derivative of films of the same genre. For example, Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1999) cannot help but come to mind due to a similar relationship between the characters and some of the themes that this film touches upon. 

Overall, The Penguin Lessons is a very sweet and moving film with an incredibly charming protagonist, by which I am not necessarily referring to Mitchell but rather to his untraditional pet. Thanks to its roots in a real-life story, director Peter Cattaneo successfully delivers a feel-good movie with an ending that, though rather sad, does pay off in the final moments.  

The Penguin Lessons will be released in US theatres on March 28, 2025, in UK & Irish cinemas on April 18, 2025, and globally in theaters later this year.