Bad Apples
Director – Jonatan Etzler – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 15 – 100m
***
A teacher deals with a disruptive student by kidnapping him and locking him in her basement – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 18th
A school trip to an apple processing factory goes badly wrong when a trainer shoe appears among the apples on the system of conveyor belts. While the other children tour the factory premises in a comparatively orderly manner under their teacher Miss Spencer (Saoirse Ronan), loner Danny (Eddie Waller) stands at the railing with one trainer missing.
The setting is Somerset. Not that you’d know. A whole potential Somerset metaphor about apples and bad apples and brewing sits in waiting, but that either never occurred to screenwriter Jess O’Kane when adapting the film from the Swedish source, the novel by De Oönskade / The Undesirables by Rasmus Lindgren (2020), or it got abandoned in an early draft. Or perhaps the director Etzler threw it out during shooting. A pity either way, because that idea has real potential.
Back at school, Miss Spencer is hauled over the coals by her superior Sylvia (Rakie Ayola).
At home, Maria Spencer plays video games – her refuge from her job.
The trouble is that whatever she tries with Danny, the child simply won’t co-operate. He makes her life a misery. Whenever she tries to contact Danny’s single parent dad, he never answers his phone. Josh (Robert Emms) is a delivery driver whose work appears to fill all his available time.
So when one night she chances to come across Danny smashing up a car in the car park with a crowbar, and accidentally injures him trying to stop him, invoking his threat to invent a story which would put the blame for the situation on her, she takes matters into her own hands and rather than take him to a hospital and risk the authorities believing him, which given his disruptive past history frankly doesn’t seem that likely, she takes him home and locks him in her basement.
Miss Spencer consolidates her imprisonment of Danny by ordering a restraining harness online and tethering him to a point in the room. Now, like a dog attached to a leash on a post, he can only go so far before he is restrained. She is pleased with herself. She has however, reckoned without Danny’s dad being the delivery driver, for some of her online orders, which leads to some pretty strange scenes when he turns up, completely unaware of the situation, as the delivery person.
Meanwhile at school, with Danny mysteriously missing and the police out looking for him, her class starts to thrive now that she can give her pupils her full attention. An Ofsted inspection singles Miss Spencer out for particular praise for her work with her class. Indeed, such is her status as a rising star within the school that staff member and former boyfriend Sam (Jacob Anderson) starts to take an interest in her all over again, even talks about promoting her.
Next, swottish teacher’s pet Pauline (Nia Brown), who idolises Miss Spencer to an unhealthy degree, unexpectedly turns up at her home one day and surmises that the missing Danny is imprisoned in the basement. With Pauline threatening to let the cat out of the bag, events come to a head at a presentation in the school hall at which Pauline threatens to reveal the truth. However, the girl may have reckoned without the sympathy of the parents of Miss Spencer’s pupils, who have seen a marked improvements in their children’s progress since Danny disappeared.
Despite the promising idea of a problem child in school and a teacher unable to control him, bolstered by a school authority that seems intent on dumping the entire problem on her then blaming her for less than satisfactory outcomes, it’s difficult to imagine that either The school wouldn’t have Danny expelled for disruptive behaviour or Miss Spencer sacked (justifiably or otherwise) for incompetence. The situation as written is fairly unbelievable and presents the actor playing the teacher with almost insurmountable problems.
While Waller is suitably convincing as the disruptive Danny, the piece is more successful as it deals with the relationship between captive student and captor teacher, with the pair unexpectedly bonding playing video games on Miss, Spencer’s huge television screen. Brown proves annoyingly irritating as the ingratiating swot.
The big problem, however, is that the main scenario resorts to an unbelievable, sensationalist, tabloid style kidnap plot which fails to convince. Watchable though she always is, Saoirse Ronan can’t compensate. The Teachers’ Lounge (İlker Çatak, 2023) dealt far more effectively with a teacher falling apart under pressure.
Bad Apples is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 18th.
Trailer: