LFF Review: ‘Bad Apples’
Bad Apples takes an impossible situation, pushes it somewhere increasingly absurd and uncomfortable, and somehow finds something unexpectedly human at the center of it. Smart, darkly funny and occasionally deeply sad, Jonatan Etzler’s black comedy works because it understands that the most interesting part of its premise is not the crime itself, but the question of how an ordinary person convinces themselves they had no other choice.
Saoirse Ronan plays Maria, a primary school teacher whose class has become almost impossible to manage thanks to Danny (Eddie Waller), a violent and relentlessly disruptive student who demands so much of her attention that everyone else in the room begins to disappear into the background. Maria is already struggling under the weight of an unsympathetic school system and the looming threat of an inspection when an altercation with Danny spirals wildly out of control. She accidentally knocks him unconscious and, in a moment of panic, ends up keeping him locked in the basement of her home. Then something unexpected happens: without Danny in the classroom, the other children begin to thrive. Maria is suddenly praised for turning things around, leaving her trapped between doing what she knows is right and preserving the version of her life that has finally started working again.
It is a ridiculous premise, and Bad Apples knows it. Rather than attempting to force the situation into something entirely realistic, Etzler and screenwriter Jess O’Kane embrace the inherent absurdity, allowing the film to hover somewhere between satire, thriller and painfully awkward comedy. The result is often hilarious, particularly as Maria’s increasingly desperate attempts to maintain control only create new problems for her to solve, but there is always something uncomfortable sitting underneath the laughter.
That balance rests almost entirely on Ronan. Maria is a fascinatingly difficult character, someone whose actions become increasingly indefensible even as the film continues to make it frighteningly easy to understand how she got there. It is an incredibly delicate performance, requiring Ronan to keep the audience connected to a woman making decisions that should, on paper, completely sever that connection. In a less intuitive performance, Maria could have quickly become either a monster or a figure the film asks us to excuse too easily. Ronan finds a far more interesting space between the two, allowing her exhaustion, loneliness, resentment and guilt to coexist without ever flattening her into something easily digestible.
She is also very, very funny. Ronan has always had impeccable comic instincts, and Bad Apples gives her plenty of opportunities to deploy them in ways that feel almost painfully natural. Much of the humor comes from Maria simply attempting to behave like a normal person while her life becomes increasingly impossible, and Ronan plays those moments with exactly the right amount of restraint. A nervous glance, an awkward pause or the slight panic behind an otherwise ordinary conversation can be funnier than any punchline.
But she never allows the comedy to erase the sadness underneath it. Maria is deeply lonely, and that loneliness gradually becomes one of the film’s most affecting elements. Her relationship with Danny begins in a place of hostility and fear, but as the situation develops, the two start to recognize something in one another. The film never forgets the deeply disturbing reality of what Maria has done, but it also slowly complicates Danny beyond the disruptive child we first meet, suggesting that his behavior is itself the product of circumstances the adults around him either cannot or will not properly address. Their strange, increasingly intimate dynamic gives the film an emotional weight that its premise initially seems designed to avoid.
That is where Bad Apples is at its smartest. For all of its outrageous twists, it is really a film about systems that have failed everyone inside them. Maria is expected to manage a child she does not have the resources to support, Danny is treated as a problem to contain rather than someone worth understanding, and the rest of the class are left to absorb the consequences. The film does not pretend to have an easy solution. In fact, much of its humor comes from just how impossible the entire situation has become.
Jacob Anderson has considerably less to do as Sam, Maria’s former fiancé and the school’s deputy principal, but he makes the most of the limited material. There is an easy warmth to Anderson’s performance that immediately gives the relationship history, even when the screenplay does not spend much time unpacking it. He brings enough pathos to Sam that his presence never feels purely functional, and the chemistry between him and Ronan adds another layer to Maria’s increasing sense of isolation.
It is a shame the film does not give Anderson more room to work. Sam represents one of the few genuine connections Maria has outside of the classroom, and there are moments where you can feel another, more emotionally complicated story sitting just beneath the surface. Still, Anderson leaves a solid impression despite his limited screentime, grounding some of the film’s more heightened passages whenever he appears.
Eddie Waller is equally crucial to making the central relationship work. Danny has to be genuinely difficult enough for Maria’s breaking point to feel believable without becoming a cartoon, and Waller manages that balance remarkably well. He is infuriating, intimidating and occasionally very funny, but the performance also leaves enough space for vulnerability to emerge. The further the film moves away from the classroom, the more obvious it becomes that Danny is not simply the “bad apple” everyone has decided he is.
That idea runs throughout the film. Who exactly is the bad apple here? Danny? Maria? The administrators who refuse to offer meaningful support? The parents who only begin paying attention once their own children are affected? Bad Apples never settles on one answer, which is precisely why it works.
Etzler keeps shifting the audience’s sympathies just enough to prevent the satire from becoming too simplistic. The film can be wickedly funny one moment and surprisingly melancholy the next, sometimes without changing its register at all. The tonal shifts are handled with impressive confidence, particularly as Maria’s predicament becomes more complicated and the consequences begin closing in around her.
Not every element lands with the same precision, and the film occasionally stretches its central conceit close to breaking point. There are moments where the satire threatens to become a little too broad, and the logic required to keep Maria’s situation going becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.
But Bad Apples is so committed to its own strange, uncomfortable rhythm that those issues rarely overwhelm it. It is funny without becoming flippant, dark without becoming needlessly cruel and sad without ever begging for sympathy. Most importantly, it trusts Ronan to hold all of those contradictions together. And she does so with flying colors.
Rating: 4/5
Bad Apples screened at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival.
Ahmad W.
Aspiring critic and poster designer.