Bad Apples: Saoirse Ronan Makes Bad Decisions Compelling

Jonatan Etzler’s dark comedy stars Saoirse Ronan as Maria Spencer, a primary school teacher whose classroom is constantly derailed by one volatile student. When frustration pushes her into a disastrous decision, the film turns an impossible situation into a moral experiment about how quickly people accept questionable methods when the results suddenly look good.

That is the sharpest idea in Bad Apples. This is not a realistic classroom drama, and it does not pretend to be one. Etzler keeps escalating the situation until the school feels almost like a social laboratory. What happens when a system improves because one person has been removed from it? And how many adults are willing to ignore the method if grades rise, the classroom calms down and everyone else seems happier?

The film plays that question as black comedy, thriller and social satire at the same time. Its humor comes from the gap between what is obviously wrong and what the people around Maria gradually find convenient. That gives the movie a nasty, uncomfortable energy. It also creates its main weakness. The further Maria digs herself in, the more the story depends on accepting increasingly implausible behavior as part of the joke. Anyone expecting a grounded drama about teachers under pressure may eventually feel the satire taking over.

Etzler, adapting Rasmus Lindgren’s novel De Oönskade and making his English-language debut, is clearly more interested in complicity than realism. The school is not just a workplace here; it becomes a miniature society where responsibility is constantly passed from one person to another. The premise is outrageous, but the uncomfortable question underneath it is very simple: if a bad decision benefits enough people, when do they stop wanting to know how that benefit was achieved?

Saoirse Ronan is what keeps the movie from becoming a one-joke provocation. Maria is exhausted, guilty, defensive and still convinced she wants to do the right thing. Ronan lets those contradictions sit together without turning her into a cartoon. Eddie Waller, as Danny, brings a hostile, unpredictable energy that keeps shifting the balance of sympathy. The film works best when neither side is easy to categorize and the power dynamic keeps changing.

Bad Apples does not push every idea as far as it could. Some turns feel designed more for absurd escalation than for a deeper point about education, parents or institutional indifference. The satire bites, but not every scene leaves the same mark.

Still, this is a smart, uncomfortable and surprisingly entertaining piece of dark comedy. Ronan gives it enough humanity to stop the film from becoming cruel for the sake of it, while Etzler keeps the moral ground deliberately unstable. Bad Apples may not be the definitive classroom satire, but it is sharp enough to make its bad choices linger. It earns 7.5 out of 10.