Indulge me for a second. Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Abe is castigating a young Homer and Barney for claiming he’s not “with it” like the countercultural cool kids of the ’60s? And Abe says:
‘I used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was. Now what I'm with isn't “it”, and what's “it” seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you!’
This is how I feel when I see Saoirse Ronan on screen. It’s a sobering experience to have watched her as a shy preteen performing as a shy preteen in Atonement, then to see her in Lady Bird as a spiky rebel in her late teens just as I was escaping mine. Now we have Bad Apples, where she plays a frazzled 30-something. Maybe I’ll ask my dad if he feels the same way about Pierce Brosnan, born in the same year as him. Perhaps he’ll relate to the bit in Goldeneye where Bond skydives into a free-falling plane.
Ronan plays Maria, a primary school teacher living alone in a rickety Somerset house she shared with Deputy Head Sam (Game of Thrones and Interview with a Vampire’s Jacob Anderson), before he decided the apples were greener in a different orchard, shall we say.
Her primary class is full of agreeable, curious children, whose potential she feels so close to unlocking; if not for Danny Carter (first-time actor Eddie Waller), a wild, disruptive presence in the classroom. His assault on another pupil comes a day before a crucial Ofsted inspection, and when Maria checks up on Danny’s father to ensure he won’t be there to ruin everything, she finds Danny instead. After a series of violent misunderstandings, Danny finds himself locked in Maria’s basement. Meanwhile, the inspection passes with flying colours. Faced with the prospect of being turned if her actions are revealed, Maria resolves to start a particularly twisted kind of private tuition.
It’s hardly a surprise that an actor first nominated for an Oscar at fourteen (for readers hoping to keep track, I was mostly playing Halo and watching anime at that time) carries the film essentially on face acting alone. As she softens into her new situation, we’re invited to consider whether Maria’s actions are the result of an exhausted teacher at the end of her rope, or if the potential to do something this drastic had been inside her all along.
Ronan took the role without much consideration, on the basis that she’s played several sympathetic characters: Lady Bird and Little Women’s Jo March, and that Bad Apples appealed because Maria is the opposite. The ambitious narrative pendulum that oscillates through the film is this: why shouldn’t we sympathise with her?
I have friends who are teachers; you almost certainly do as well. My aunts, currently living their best lives in retirement in leafy North London, could hardly wait to take the register one last time and walk into the sunset. Does it mean that teachers don’t find their work fulfilling and satisfying, that by and large their intentions are good in choosing such a thankless profession? Of course not. After all, Maria’s efforts are rewarded in the form of precocious teacher’s pet Pauline, the other sterling child performance in the film by the be-braced Nia Brown.
Although this too turns out to have a rotten core as Pauline’s obsession with her teacher threatens to uncover the missing Danny. He’s shackled in what turns into a boarding house that Maria makes as comfortable as she can, in the hope that his anger will fade and her teaching will get through to him. But a cage with a Playstation and football-themed bedding is still a cage.
The film is an adaptation of a Swedish novel and, as a comedy - admittedly a dark one - it’s got a particularly Scandi outlook on how a community might react to such a case. Oh, it’s horrible, yes, poor Danny, yes… but isn’t it so nice and quiet, all of a sudden?
Like The Drama and The Invite before it, Bad Apples is a great cinematic experience principally because of how an audience will react to the toe-curling efforts Maria goes to in keeping her secret. Its status on the poster as a "dark comedy" sometimes feels a little specious, but as with other hostage-taking films like Parasite and Misery, the absurdity of Maria's predicament can often leave you with a choice of laughter or screaming, and mostly in the same breath.
When you get out of the screening, ask your teacher friends if there’s an unruly pupil they wish they could have locked in a dark room for a year. Of course they would never actually do it; how horrible! But, they’ll have a name in their mind. And unlike Saoirse Ronan, their eyes might give them away.
Bad Apples (15)
★★★★☆
101 minutes. In cinemas.
