To international viewers, Bad Apples will play like a conventional dark comedy about a schoolteacher pushed too far by a student; to Brits, it’s a scorched Earth takedown of a state education system that has failed millions of children, any laughs to be had cathartic through the tears. What’s surprising is that such a state-of-the-nation takedown arrives courtesy of Swedish director Jonatan Entzler in his English-language debut, relocating Scandinavian source material to a classroom in the southwest of England. Working with breakthrough screenwriter Jess O’Kane, he’s done an impeccable job encapsulating decades of political failures towards younger generations into a morally slippery kidnapping comedy, weaponizing viewers’ own experiences in the classroom (both as parents and students) to try making you empathize with the criminal adult over their victim. It’s provocative simply because it’s a crowd-pleaser that relies on you abandoning any shred of empathy, highlighting a societal problem by making unsuspecting viewers delight in the worst possible solution to it while revealing unconscious biases.
Saoirse Ronan stars as Maria, an exhausted elementary school teacher who frequently has her patience tested by Danny (Eddie Waller), the one badly behaved kid in her class. She won’t admit it, but he’s worn down on her; she’s received endless warnings from the principal for not keeping him in line, the exhaustion led her engagement with another teacher to fall apart, and she has very little time to devote to other students while spending so much of lesson time dealing with him. After Danny’s suspended for pushing a girl down the stairs and breaking her arm, Maria visits his dad, a gig-economy delivery worker whose low-paid, high-hours job means he spends little time at home. He’s a nice guy who can’t understand his boy’s rage, their father-son relationship the manifestation of that one tweet about dead-beat dads not being there because their kids have bad vibes. He needs to leave for work, but Maria finds Danny attacking her car as he drives off; she restrains him and attempts to take him to the hospital, but after he says he’ll tell the police she beat him, she hastily takes him back to her house and locks him in the basement until he calms down.
What should be the logical inciting act of a conventional crime narrative is anything but. Danny’s disappearance makes headlines but vanishes quickly, and without him in the class, the other children’s grades rise significantly––the school inspector even singles out Maria for praise when he comes to observe her class, paving the way for a promotion. O’Kane’s screenplay relishes stoking the flames of the hand-wringing right-wing arguments you’ll often see whenever the topic of schools comes up in the news: that a lack of discipline from teachers, and placing pupils in classes with mixed learning abilities, hinders the futures of the brightest few. In actuality, underfunding the education system, severe teacher shortages due to low pay and high hours, and the repeal of a law which restricted classes to a maximum of 30 pupils (perhaps the weakest aspect of Bad Apples’ world-building is that the classroom here is considerably more manageable than that) are the culprits. It’s a film which relishes in convincing you that there is an easy answer to the problem, only to twist the knife once you start warming to what it proposes to fix things. Would you close your eyes to certain horrors if it meant your child was guaranteed the best possible start in life?
None of this would be effective if the film didn’t simultaneously weaponize Danny, spending the best part of the first half convincing you he is merely a kid with bad vibes. Violent, hateful, and destructive for the sheer hell of it, he’s what every parent fears, doubly so because he doesn’t have the excuse of a bad father to pin the blame on. We’re primed to see him the way we’ve been taught to see any working-class child who doesn’t have an obvious academic future: a lost cause whose presence drains classmates of their potential. No child at such an impressionable age should be written off, but when they can’t be given extra attention, that’s what happens––Danny only gets the devotion he needs from his teacher when she’s restrained him in her basement because she’s too overworked during school hours. It’s no surprise that his violent rages come from a genuine place; there have been hundreds of thousands of kids like him who have never been offered help because they were failed from their first mistake. Everybody knows at least one Danny. Many of us might have been closer to being a Danny than we could have ever imagined.
Ronan is a gifted comedic actress, a talent exploited by far fewer filmmakers than acceptable, but she doesn’t straightforwardly adopt that tone in her performance, despite the unrelenting pitch-black humor. If anything, the darkness stems from her often playing Maria as if she were an audience surrogate, a figure in over her head who just panicked at the wrong moment, her actions framed as the kind of mistake anybody would make under such pressure. She becomes a far more malevolent figure in a way that’s effective because the performance never pronounces it as such; when she helps join a police search for Danny alongside his father, knowing damn well where his son is, the film never overstates the sheer lack of morality this would take. For British viewers, this moment will likely be reminiscent of the early-2000s Soham Murders case, where a school caretaker murdered two young pupils at his home––his victims were only discovered several days after he had appeared on national news giving interviews as part of the search party looking for them.
That this film could invoke such a notorious story without ever feeling tasteless is commendable, but this is the rare dark comedy which wants to provoke without relying on shock tactics. As with the Netflix hit Adolescence, a singular case study gradually reveals a highly detailed tapestry of ways the next generation are being failed in the classroom, just like their parents before them. Entzler makes his point via omission, showing a funhouse-mirror view of fixing the education system––it’s far more impactful than if he’d called out the cause directly.
Needless to say many countries have these issues in their own schools, but Bad Apples tackles a very specifically British institutional issue in a way I’m not sure will fully translate outside of its home country. It’s a damning political indictment disguised as a fun, twisty thriller.
Bad Apples screened at the 2025 BFI London Film Festival.
The post BFI London Review: Bad Apples Sets Saoirse Ronan in a Twisty Thriller first appeared on The Film Stage.
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