Described as “unhinged” (Screen Rant) and “bonkers” (Metro), Jonatan Etzler’s Bad Apples horrifies audiences while putting them into fits of laughter.
Saoirse Ronan shines in this hilarious and shocking dark-comedy thriller as the thinly-stretched, primary school teacher, Ms Spencer. She struggles to teach her class while our first ‘bad apple’, Danny (Eddie Waller) runs riot.
Ms Spencer (Saoirse Ronan) is a well-intentioned primary school teacher trying to prove herself to her superiors. However, she is on thin ice as she repeatedly fails to contain Danny.
He is not a cheeky chappy trying to make his peers laugh; Danny is violent, temperamental, and impenetrable. The staff try to contain him, the pupils try to avoid him.
Chris Roe’s fantastic score for the film makes the tension that follows Danny visceral; I flinched whenever he was on screen. Ms Spencer’s attempts to get through to Danny results in him breaking a fellow pupil’s arm.
Ms Spencer is forced to find an unorthodox, albeit effective, way to stop Danny’s destructive wrath. This is a brilliant yet subtle social commentary on the desperation teachers feel when they are unsupported by educational institutions.
Ms Spencer is only forced to take matters into her own hands because no one else wanted to deal with Danny. Ronan’s character even begs for a 1-1 for Danny in the film, claiming she would then be able to focus on the rest of the class.
The main ethical issue of the film of how Ms Spencer deals with Danny, could have been entirely avoided if she had more support from educational institutions.
Scary things happen in this film, but the scariest thing about it is the plausibility of these events. I’m sure there were teachers in the audience who had fantasised about doing what Ms Spencer did.
There are Ms Spencers up and down the UK, young, well-intentioned teachers who are just trying their best without being given the tools to do so. While Ms Spencer acts questionably at times, this just reflects her desperation to be a good teacher, no matter the cost. After Danny runs away, a utopia unfolds in the school.
Ms Spencer’s pupils are thriving, her superiors finally recognise her hard work, and her co-worker and ex-boyfriend starts to fall for her again. We almost forget that Danny is missing, and a moral question arises: can one person’s suffering be justified if it ensures everyone else’s happiness?
This film will feel particularly nostalgic for the state-school educated among us. We all had a Danny — though maybe not quite as dangerous as this one — who would throw a chair across the classroom for no reason.
What is even more relatable is the feel and look of the school; the slap-dash decor, the scuffed paint, the visible exhaustion of the teachers that was impossible to ignore, having one proper “goodie-two-shoes” in the class, the gossip about the teachers dating, the higher-ups that never did anything but somehow had the nicest suits and cars.
The title cleverly alludes to some of the characters being ‘bad apples’ without specifying who. As the plot thickens and more characters show their flaws, it becomes hard to identify who is good and who is rotten.
After Danny runs away, we focus our attention on the other pupils, revealing that they are by no means perfect.
Alongside Ronan, Eddie Waller [Danny] and Nia Brown [Pauline] provide outstanding and immersive breakout-roles that disorient audiences with the moral dilemma they present to us.