Bad Apples

Etzler, making his English-language debut, has form with the educator-under-siege setup, and the confidence shows. He keeps the frame boxed in. Classrooms, apartments, a basement, a delivery package: the composition returns again and again to squares and right angles, so that order and confinement start to look like the same thing. Nea Harnebrandt Asphäll's cinematography treats this geometry as a recurring visual argument rather than a one-off gag, and the production design extends it into the smallest corners of the set. Chris Roe's score leans emphatically dramatic, and it does its best work under a run of montage sequences whose subject I will leave for you to discover. The irony of those montages is the film's cleanest trick, and the music sells it.

Ronan is the engine. She plays against the poised resilience she is known for, letting Maria's authority evaporate the second she walks into a room full of children. Etzler favours the tight close-up, holding on her face while several contradictory feelings cross it in a single shot, and Ronan gives him the register to sustain that. Wretched one moment, resourceful the next, she keeps a genuinely appalling character watchable through sheer comic timing. The performance is the reason the film's cruelty reads as comedy rather than horror.

Jess O'Kane's screenplay works in a tradition the film wears openly: the gallows humour of Shallow Grave, the satirical needle of Election, the Dahl-adjacent pleasure in children as agents of chaos and adults as the real rot. The idiom in the title gets inverted. The disruptive kid is not the corruption here; the desperation of the teacher, the complicity of the parents, and the silence of the institution are. When the film escalates through a blackmail subplot involving a class suck-up, it finds its sharpest pivot, cranking tension without dropping the joke.

Whether the satire finally bites is the film's live question, and it is worth naming honestly. The picture is heavily stylised, and the stylisation has a cost: Maria's exhaustion can read as another gag rather than a lived struggle, which loosens the tether to anything real. The moral puzzle is nifty and the third act asks you to accept some wild implausibilities to keep the puzzle spinning. Etzler's wager is that discomfort should arrive late, on reflection, after you have already laughed. At its best that wager pays. When it misses, the film feels cooler and more sealed-off than a premise this incendiary should allow. What is not in doubt is the craft holding it together, and a lead performance that would justify the ticket on its own.

I want to start with the montages, because they are where I think the film either works on you or doesn't. Roe's orchestral score swells while Maria feeds, clothes, teaches Danny to read, and plays FIFA with him in her basement, and the whole grim joke is that captivity is measurably improving his life. That is the Omelas move made literal, the perfect arrangement resting on one hidden, suffering child, except here the child isn't suffering so much as thriving, and the adults around him are the ones rotting. It's a genuinely nasty idea and the film commits to it.

The delivery scene is the moment I'd point anyone to. The driver bringing Danny's heavy-duty harness turns out to be Danny's own tear-choked father, Josh, and the film lets that irony sit without underlining it. That's the tone at its most precise. The Pauline escalation is the other high point, the class suck-up sniffing out where Danny is and extorting favourable treatment through increasingly eccentric, song-based blackmail. It's here the thriller and the comedy finally fuse instead of trading turns.

Where I land is close to the split in the reception. Chase Hutchinson's scalpel line feels right on the film's ambition, cutting at the lies people tell to mask who they are. James Mottram's read of it as a three-way power play among teacher, student, and PTA gets at the structure. But Giovanni Lago's dissent isn't a contrarian shrug, and I don't think it should be waved off. His argument that the satire sets up punchlines that rarely land, leaving the thing more sterile than its premise promises, describes a real failure mode this movie flirts with. The stylisation that makes the cruelty funny is the same stylisation that keeps Maria's actual exhaustion at arm's length. You laugh, but you're not always tethered.

Guy Lodge's point is the one I keep returning to: the film 'winds up siding with no one,' leaving the moral question unresolved rather than argued. Is that a flaw or the whole design? Etzler has said publicly he considers this realism, that people are genuinely weird when you look closely, and I think he'd say refusing to resolve is the honest choice. I'm half convinced. An amorality tale that declines to moralise is a legitimate form. But there's a difference between withholding a verdict on purpose and not having one, and Bad Apples doesn't always make that difference legible. The third-act implausibilities Leslie Felperin flags are the tell. When the plot has to bend that far to keep the puzzle spinning, the puzzle starts to feel like the point, and the people become pieces.

On Ronan I'm firmly with the majority. Lago's line that she 'isn't particularly at the height of her powers' is the one place I'd push back hardest. Inverting her usual self-possession IS the work here, and the wide-eyed tremble that reads as diminishment is exactly the register the part needs. Watch what she does in the close-ups Etzler keeps cutting to, the ones he carried over from The Outrun. She's building a person from wretched to resourceful across a series of held shots, and she keeps it funny. That's not a coasting performance.

If I were cutting, I'd tighten the back third. The film earns its late discomfort but pays for it with plausibility, and I suspect a leaner run at the climax would have let the moral queasiness land without the machinery creaking so loudly. The parts of the supporting ensemble around Ronan are doing real work too, though the film keeps most of them in service to her arc rather than giving them room. What holds is the tone. Etzler wanted the laughter first and the sting on the drive home, and for a stylised dark comedy about the worst decision a tired person ever made, he mostly gets the timing of that delay right.