Bad Apples: Saoirse Ronan is this black comedy’s secret weapon

Right from the off, as nightmare pupil Danny causes chaos on a primary class trip to a local cider factory – destroying a batch with a well-lobbed trainer – you’re aware that this small, darkly funny drama is tackling a big, contentious subject. Just how can teachers deal with the violent, unteachable pupils whose behaviour can’t be tamed?

Danny’s constant wild disruptions promise to end timid teacher Maria’s career, as well as his classmates’ Sats hopes. His every action in her West Country classroom is filled with thrumming menace, yet the principal insists that Maria (Saoirse Ronan) will be sacked if she can’t control him. Like the teacher hero of the brooding Swedish film Who Saw Him Die? (1968), she is being slowly unravelled by anxiety about being unable to control her class. But this pitch-black comedy is unafraid to coax horrified laughs from us as feral Danny (a fine, sullen Eddie Waller) hurls abuse and objects freely, and fractures smarmy classmate Pauline’s arm with a sharp shove down the stairs. Director Jonatan Etzler – perhaps not coincidentally, also Swedish, and here making his English-language debut – already has form with teacher-taunting stories: his unsettling 2018 short Get Ready with Me (which deservedly won a Student Academy Award) put a hapless film instructor smartly through the wringer. But this time he’s taking aim at a bigger target, an education system so rigid that it is unable to cope with those who can’t or won’t fit in. Jess O’Kane’s enjoyably cynical script finds the sweet spot that turns Rasmus Lindgren’s original novel (De Oönskade – ‘The Unwanted’) into an edgy and assured satire on how the widespread obsession with school discipline – and our target-ridden education culture – puts vulnerable children and teachers alike under heavy pressure.

A victim of that unrelenting force, Maria panics when she accidentally knocks Danny unconscious while trying to stop him vandalising cars, and he threatens to go to the police. Locking him in her soundproof basement to save tomorrow’s snap Ofsted inspection and her job truly seems like the best solution. But this stretches inevitably into months of hidden imprisonment for Danny, while Maria feigns ignorance of his disappearance.

With this one deft and rather extreme move, the film becomes a ‘What would YOU do?’ story, a potentially hazardous but undeniably exciting gambit. Like this year’s The Drama, it risks alienating its audience to explore a hot-button issue with a sympathetic heroine, whose appalling choices threaten to upend her life. Who would root for a teacher who kidnaps an unruly pupil and imprisons him in her basement? Yet the film enlists our sympathy for the vulnerable Maria with remarkable ease, and we find ourselves following her happily to some dark places. Ronan’s wide-eyed, tremulous performance is the film’s secret weapon, effortlessly building up Maria from wretched to resourceful as things get tough. Etzler skilfully uses Ronan’s ability to register a welter of emotions in a single shot (displayed in 2024’s equally challenging The Outrun), zooming in frequently on her dazed face and darting eyes as Maria wriggles out of one sticky situation after another.

The film plots her progress with a finely judged balance of tension and humour, wringing grim laughs out of her sudden predicaments, perhaps most enjoyably when the driver delivering to Maria the package containing Danny’s heavy-duty harness turns out to be Danny’s own father, the inept and inconsolably tear-choked Josh. Paternal tears aside, one of the film’s most delicious ironies is that the long-neglected Danny’s life chances are considerably enhanced while he’s her prisoner. In a succession of perky montages, animated by Chris Roe’s emphatically dramatic orchestral score, Maria feeds and clothes Danny properly for the first time, and even plays Fifa with him. After discovering his hidden illiteracy in one poignant exchange, she provides the daily one-to-one tuition he desperately needs. Her other pupils are blossoming in his absence, her teaching has been transformed. Josh’s search parties are dwindling (possibly because he berates his searchers hilariously for “only being in it for the Instagram content”). Could this arrangement be (whisper it) all for the best?

However, the film never lets you forget that, behind the smirking ironies and Maria’s comic near-misses, there’s a sad, chained-up kid shitting into a bucket, and it offers up some exquisitely painful moments. When Danny sobs that no one cares enough about him to find him, and Maria hugs him tight and whispers “I care,” it becomes chillingly clear she’s both his jailer and his most loving adult. Waller, simmering with contained anger for most of the film, brings an impressive power and naturalism to his performance that allows him to go head to head with Ronan. But as the ripening and rotting apple footage rolls by us, in an uncharacteristically heavy-handed attempt to symbolise the passing seasons, Danny’s grudging bond with Maria never obscures his hunger to be free.

Rather than opting for a Misery-style basement battle of wits between Danny and Maria, Etzler and O’Kane eventually throw in a sly plot reversal, to keep us on our toes. This cranks up the tension mightily, as class suck-up Pauline (an alarmingly intense Nia Brown) discovers Danny’s whereabouts and blackmails Maria into favouring her shamelessly in lessons. There’s a whiff of the geeky desperation of Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) in her attention hunger (her brash, wealthy parents neglect her as thoroughly as Danny’s impoverished father did him) as well as in her eccentric, often song-based methods of extortion. As her ingenious attempts at revealing Maria’s crime ramp up, however, the film makes a cheeky final twist, dropping the wider school community into the story and losing a bit of narrative credibility in the process. What it does do nicely, though, is force us to confront some uncomfortable questions about our own roles in a system that squeezes children into regulated outcomes as efficiently as the apples are funnelled into the cider factory hopper, eliciting a guilty shudder or two alongside the belly laughs. There are no answers given, of course. It’s just a wicked, winking little comedy, not an education White Paper. But one that shows us that the real rot may not be in the children, but in the adults.

► Bad Apples is in UK cinemas 18 September.