‘Bad Apples’ Review: TIFF Movie Delights With Schoolyard Twists

Bad Apples is one of the funniest and darkest satires of the year, full of audacious and unexpected twists and turns while never losing sight of the bigger picture.

Being a teacher is hard. It’s a largely thankless profession that pays little relative to the effort involved and the importance of your work. You’re constantly under pressure from students, parents, superiors and performance evaluators. And there’s always gonna be that one kid that seems determined to mess up your day. Or your week. Or your life. 

So maybe chaining him to a wall in your basement isn’t the craziest idea in the world.

In Jonatan Etzler’s Bad Apples, Saoirse Ronan plays Maria, a primary school teacher who does just that. Her problem child Danny (Eddie Waller) is a menace to her classroom, interrupting lessons, disrupting field trips, attacking and injuring her star pupil Pauline (Nia Brown). Parents and the school administration seem to blame her as an inexperienced young teacher incapable of controlling a single student, and her job is under threat. When an incident between them escalates to Maria locking Danny in her basement for a day to try to calm him down, she’s surprised to find that her students and career begin to thrive in his absence. Maybe it’d be better for everyone if she just kept him down there.

You may think you know what you’re getting based on the premise, a black comedy about the education system, and I won’t go into much more specifics because half the fun is watching the chaos unfold. But what’s great about Bad Apples is its surprising empathy towards its characters and its willingness to continually upend audience expectations. It keeps you on your toes and constantly makes decisions that you question only to pay off in unexpected ways. 

Ronan’s excellent performance is a given at this point (death, taxes, Saoirse Ronan knocking it out of the park), and it’s great to see her in a role that lets her run free to flex her comedic chops while never sacrificing dramatic complexity. Yes she has arguably toed a similar line in Greta Gerwig’s films, but here she is given way more room to run wild. Maria is easy to sympathize with, a lonely woman at the end of her rope who genuinely cares for her students, even Danny. At the same time, it is hilarious to see her try to rationalize the absurdity of child kidnapping with the fact that her life blossoms as a result of it. A small thing I loved about the film is how the cinematography shifts from cold and sterile prior to the kidnapping, to warm and vibrant as her luck changes for the better. She’s practically glowing at certain points.

The true surprises in performance comes from Eddie Waller as Danny and Nia Brown as Pauline, both making their debuts. Not only do they hold their own against Ronan (arguably the best actor of her generation), but they pull off very complex and nuanced shifts in audience sympathy in a way you rarely see in child performances. Danny is a problem child but the film never accepts that he is a problem to solve by elimination. He is a child worthy of love, empathy and redemption, and Waller does a great job not allowing his character to be reduced to a convenient stereotype. On the other end of that spectrum is Brown as Waller, a teacher’s pet and goody two-shoes whose slowly revealed depths inject the film with even more chaos that is a blast to watch.

It would make a great pairing with Weapons, a double feature about missing school children and mistreated teachers where the community responds in polar opposite ways. The Wire Season 4 is another interesting comparison, as explorations of trying to socialize children left behind by the education system. 

The film also feels largely like a riff on Ursula K. Le Guin’s seminal novella The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. Check it out if you haven’t read it, it is literally only like 5 pages long and readily available online. It functions almost as a thought experiment of sorts and similar to the titular subject, I will fail to do it justice by describing it. I will try nevertheless.

Imagine Omelas, a city beyond description. So beautiful and peaceful that words falter and fail to capture its quality. Happiness is such a given to the point where such terminology is no longer relevant. Smiles are redundant. They live without inequality, hierarchy, poverty, weapons, and all the other seemingly innate and institutional problems seen in every human and human society throughout history. Imagine the texture, intricacies and details however you like, it’s unimportant and entirely subjective, but try to truly believe and accept that such a place could exist and is possible.

Now imagine a single child kept underground in a cellar or perhaps a basement. The child is neglected and abused, living in squalor and filth. And it is understood by every resident in the city that their peace and prosperity is entirely dependent on the constant suffering of this one child, a sacrificial sin-eater. A single act of kindness towards the child would shatter the splendor and serenity of the city together.

When many of the citizens first learn this fact, they have trouble with it. They yearn to free the child, to end the injustice. But most eventually acquiesce, reasoning that the greater good is more important, and the child is probably too far gone away, and would be unable to even appreciate its freedom anymore. But some can’t live with this reality. They refuse to accept it. Perhaps you don’t as well. They walk away from Omelas, away to a place even less imaginable, a place that perhaps doesn’t exist and could never exist. They walk away nevertheless.

Bad Apples challenges its audience to think similarly about the actual logistics and costs of “the greater good” argument in an extreme form. This exploration prevents it from reducing itself into a simple surreal comedy that mocks all its subjects, instead treating its characters with honesty and dignity. Which is what makes it all the more fascinating to watch.

Bad Apples is directed by Jonatan Etzler with a screenplay by Jess O’Kane, based on the novel De Oönskade by Rasmus Lindgren. It stars Saoirse Ronan, Jacob Anderson, Eddie Waller, Nia Brown, Rakie Ayola and Robert Emms. We caught it at the Toronto International Film Festival.

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