BAD APPLES Review

A primary school teacher kidnaps her most disruptive student, chains him to her basement wall with a harness she found by googling "how to live with an 800lb gorilla," and the film then has the audacity to make you sit with the fact that you kind of understand why she did it. This is Bad Apples. It is not for everyone. It is absolutely for me.

Saoirse Ronan plays Maria, known only as Ms. to the children at an aggressively posh British school that talks endlessly about its students' wellbeing while refusing to fund the support any of them actually need. She is exhausted and underappreciated and blamed by every parent for every problem their child has ever had. Ronan plays all of that with this low key comic weariness that is somehow both hilarious and genuinely moving. She did not want to kidnap Danny. Things just got out of hand. You know how it is.

Danny, played by extraordinary newcomer Eddie Waller, is one of the most convincingly demonic children I have encountered in recent cinema. Hair perpetually dishevelled, uniform permanently untucked, face arranged into an expression of maximum disruption. The day before he disappeared he pushed a classmate over a bannister and broke her arm so badly the bone came through the skin. I am not saying he deserved what happened to him. I am saying the film is sophisticated enough to make the moral calculus genuinely complicated, which is much more interesting than either condemning or endorsing Maria outright.

What makes Bad Apples so wickedly good is what happens after Danny disappears. The school thrives. The other children blossom. The parents who spent months blaming Maria for everything are suddenly in love with her. Her overbearing principal apologises for misjudging her. Even the ex who left her is looking at her differently. Everything is coming up roses, and the film lets you enjoy that for just long enough to make you deeply uncomfortable about enjoying it.

Meanwhile in the basement Danny is playing FIFA and getting the one-on-one attention that Ashton Brook never once provided him, which is either the film's most provocative joke or its most pointed piece of social commentary, possibly both simultaneously.

Ronan is typically magnificent. Young Nia Brown as Pauline, the classmate with the broken arm, turns out to be the film's secret weapon in ways I will not spoil. Director Jonatan Etzler steers the whole increasingly absurd situation with a steady hand and a genuine eye for the kind of detail that does a lot of work quietly, like the fact that Maria keeps her TV on the coffee table, which tells you everything about her life in one shot.

It takes a village to raise a child. Bad Apples argues, with considerable wit and genuine fury, that it also takes a village to leave one behind.

🍿 SCORE = 80 / 100