22/09/2025 - Saoirse Ronan is a teacher in crisis in Jonatan Etzler’s sophomore feature, a primary school-set satire in which perhaps there’s no such thing as a good person

Any primary-school teacher would tell you that the classroom is a battlefield, but if you’re going to ask who’s the general and who are the soldiers, the jury’s still out on that one. Pedagogy can only do so much in an environment that’s made practically half-psyop by demanding school administrators and troublesome students, as explored by Swedish director Jonatan Etzler in his deliciously cunning sophomore feature, with a first-feature screenplay effort by Jess O’Kane based on the novel De Oönskade by Rasmus Lindgren. Led by an always-captivating Saoirse Ronan in her young-professionals era, Bad Apples has just opened the 73rd San Sebastián's New Directors Strand after a world premiere in Toronto’s Special Presentations section.

While the pre-teen class of Miss Spencer (Ronan) – Maria to her coworkers, or simply the honorary “Miss” to her students – is no Garden of Eden, there’s clearly one fruit that jumps out: a so-called poisonous “bad boy”, Danny Carter (Eddie Waller, fittingly armed with a shaggy mullet and a perpetual scowl), prone to fits of rage at school. An evening run-in leads Miss to panic and lock Danny in her decrepit basement, straight out of a horror premise if it weren’t so grimly humorous. After she orders a dog harness online to keep the boy in check for weeks on end and now plasters on a smile in public, her freshly peaceful classroom rockets Miss to new scholastic heights, and she is lauded by school headmistress Sylvia (a hilariously by-the-book Rakie Ayola). Danny’s father Josh (Robert Emms), the police and the community search in vain for him, but the whispers begin: maybe things are better with him gone.

No one would dare utter this out loud in real life, suggests Etzler, yet so many are probably thinking it, some sick with guilt – and others not. The Swedish filmmaker knows what he wants out of this wicked, delightfully outrageous story and gets it, unsettling countless viewers along the way as an intended result, undoubtedly horrified by their instinctual reaction to what’s playing out on screen. Whether one points a finger at a person or at the system, we’ll never get to the bottom of the age-old adage of nature versus nurture. What the director uncovers along the way about how the audience thinks about their own moral compass is profoundly more interesting.

If we’re praising Conclave [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Red Carpet @ European Film …
film profile] for its ridiculous divertissement, let's not shy away from doing the same with Bad Apples, which requires the audience’s buy-in and unconditional surrender to its increasingly absurd turns. Accompanied by an omnipresent, thunderous and almost villainous soundtrack by Chris Roe, Bad Apples signals its pitch-black satire with gusto, with inserted shots (cinematography by Nea Asphäll) of orchard apples sparkling artificially in the sun, rotting from the inside out. A special mention goes to teacher’s pet Pauline (Nia Brown), introduced as a bit of a rotting Golden Delicious: her bespectacled visage and toothy grin turn from adorably nerdy to conniving in an instant, bringing a plurality of devious laughs in the film’s second half.

At the end of the day, maybe we can at least agree on one thing: teachers everywhere deserve much better than the shit they have to put up with every day.

Bad Apples is a UK production by Pulse Films, sold worldwide by Republic Pictures.