I’m not sure what it is about 2026 that has made it the year of locking troubled young men in basements, but here we are, I suppose.
We’ve had Good Boy, and now, we’ve got Bad Apples, Johnathan Etzler’s adaptation of the Rasmus Lindgren novel of the same name. It’s a weirdly specific premise, but one that, for some reason, is having a bit of a moment right now. And this particular take might be the darkest one yet – Bad Apples follows Maria (Saoirse Ronan), a young teacher at a primary school in Somerset who struggles with the behavioural issues exhibited by Danny, one of the boys in her class. Which she soon puts a stop to by, as any good teacher would, accidentally kidnapping him and locking him in her basement.
Which is an objectively bonkers place to start your story. I mean, this is meant to be a comedy, and it’s got the premise of a particularly gritty crime procedural episode. And, in the wrong hands, I think it could have been a complete disaster; it’s such a full-on premise that the temptation must have been there to soften up the edges a little, to make the characters and community around this heinous act quick to stand against it.
But, thankfully, Bad Apples wound up in the right hands with Etzler and Ronan, who makes for a superb pairing in this pitch-black comedy. Ronan, despite her stardom, has retained the ability to convincingly a relatively normal human being, and she’s predictably fantastic as Maria – a woman at the frazzled edge of an overworked and underfunded educational system who, personally and professionally, is beholden to forces she’s got next to no grasp on. The film’s pitch-black tone doesn’t forgive her for what she does, but it makes sense of why she would, couching her choice in the selfishness of the rest of the community and how uninterested they are in meaningfully contending with what left Danny so troubled in the first place. Bad Apples makes no bones in its brutal satire of the British school system, children are reduced to numbers, education to a series of tick-boxes to be filled out on the Ofsted report.
But the real star turn in this film is Nia Brown as Pauline, a student obsessed with Maria who accidentally discovers the kidnapping and uses it as leverage to gain power over Maria at school. Brown is fucking sensational in this role, a blackmailer hidden behind a pair of braids and a cheerful rendition of the school song whose own neglect parallels Danny’s – she’d fit right in to any classic thriller, a constantly threatening force looms over the plot and pushes it towards a fantastically mean climax that fits perfectly with the movie’s twisted tone. She might be my favourite villain of the year, a completely unexpected match for Ronan in a role that, I hope, will mark the start of many for the brilliant young actor.
Bad Apples is a delightfully twisted and brilliantly-acted black comedy that makes the most of its deliciously nasty premise – and features some tremendous turns from unexpected sources. Not many comedies are willing to get as nasty as this one does, but Bad Apples is all the better for its rotten core.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via NME)
