Opening at the Laemmle Royal in West Los Angeles and the Laemelle NoHo Theatrei is Jonatan Etzer’s Bad Apples, which stars Saorise Ronan as an exhausted teacher working in a typically underfunded British elementary school. The film was previously screened at the AFI FEST in October 2025. Saorise Ronan resorts to desperate, foolish measures to deal with a difficult student (Eddie Waller). The story is an adaptation of the Swedish novel De Oönskade, which has some cultural dissonance with its shift to a British setting. In some ways, the film reworks trope of an exhausted teacher vs. a cynical student, echoing Election. In other ways, the film recalls Ruben Ostlund’s social satires like The Squareand Triangle of Sadness.
The always-good Saoirse Ronan plays Maria, an unmarried teacher at a fancy private school who has a child in her class that is making life intolerable. You know the kind. The little jerk is named Danny (Eddie Waller), and he lashes out literally all the time, whether he’s drawing on his desk or throwing a sneaker into the machine at a cider mill. Of course, Maria is restrained by red tape as to what she can possibly do about it, basically just asked to deal with it and keep teaching.
Etzler’s most interesting idea is to reflect how much a kid like Danny sucks up all the oxygen in the room. He takes all of her attention, which means the kids who need an actual teacher don’t have one because she’s forced to play babysitter and warden instead.
One day, Maria catches Danny smashing cars with a crowbar in the parking lot, grabbing him and wrestling him to the ground. He gets injured, threatening to tell everyone that Maria attacked him. If she takes him to the hospital or home, she’ll probably lose her job. People always believe the kids, even the bad one. So, what does she do? She shackles him to her basement floor. Her class thrives. Even Danny seems to accept his fate, being home-schooled by Maria. But when another kid proves to be just as (and maybe more) unsettling, Maria learns that not all apples look the same.
Although underpaid and disrespected, teachers are nonetheless held to rigidly high standards of care, compassion and rectitude. They are to be exemplary stewards of children, while unflinchingly enduring the battering of parents, administrators and outside agitators. Which is why it’s often so compelling, in a dark and squirmy way, to watch them break bad on film. We have, of course, seen plenty of ill-advised (or illegal) sexual relationships between teacher and student, in myriad movies and TV programs. Jonatan Etzler’s Bad Apples is a very dark comedy with a sharp satirical bite set in a British primary school in Somerset. Jess O’Kane adapts Rasmus Lindgren’s novel De Oönskade into a story that treats ethics like a pressure cooker. Etzler seems to be afraid to get truly dark with the potential of his kidnapping concept.
The film’s sense of humor starts with a concrete, visual gag that doubles as theme. On a class trip to a cider factory, a single sneaker rides a conveyor among glossy apples. Rot, hygiene, and blame are already in play. When Danny later vanishes and the classroom suddenly thrives, the laughter grows jagged. Order improves, metrics rise, and a community relaxes. The joke lands, then lingers: comfort often has a cost, and the bill is easy to hide when institutions reward calm over care.
Danny’s character is interesting as it shifts from a bold trouble maker to submissive leaner. A basement scene with a harness limits Danny’s movement, yet a later quiet exchange reveals an unmet need, including a gap in reading that reframes earlier chaos as frustration. He is hurt and hurtful in the same breath.
Nia Brown’s Pauline watches everything. Her bargaining over what she hears in Maria’s house pushes the film into a sly power game. The long holiday-song bit at a parents’ meeting starts cute, then turns into a negotiation conducted in plain sight. Robert Emms, as Josh, plays a father stretched thin by delivery shifts and guilt. He searches, prints posters, stares at his phone, and never seems to find the right door. Around them, Sylvia the headteacher and deputy head Sam embody systems and histories that shape choices. Moral judgment stays cool; behavior, silence, and consequence do the talking.
Apple imagery keeps pricking the frame. The conveyor full of fruit, the out-of-place sneaker, the shine that hides bruises. The title reads like a warning about labels, not a verdict on one child. Pacing in the middle section relies on repetition and clandestine routine. The same walk downstairs, the same careful tray, the same nervous glance at a front door. Dread grows inside a loop that feels like a game system built for quiet win.
Image, editing, and sound are used to place Maria at thresholds and edges, a person who keeps choosing the border rather than the center. The final images are bleak and funny in the same breath, crystallizing communal complicity and Maria’s self-preservation. Certain motivations blur, and a few logistical steps wobble. The satirical design still lands, because the film treats systems like mechanics that reward order over care, then shows how quickly people learn to play.
It’s not hard to see some social commentary here about how the loudest minority opinions drown out any actual conversation and growth. How far would you go to create a better society? What should we do with the true bad apples of this world, the ones who are allowing the good ones to go rotten from lack of care?
