Monthly Archives: October 2025

  • Bad Apples

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jonatan Etzler (2025)

    The director and his source material are Swedish, but this is Jonatan Etzler’s first English-language feature, and the action has shifted from Sweden to the West Country of England.  Cider country:  that serves to justify the change of title – Rasmus Andersson’s 2020 novel is De Oönskade, which translates as ‘The Unwanted’- and Etzler loses no time illustrating his story’s malic metaphor.  The first sequence of Bad Apples takes place in a cider mill.  Myriad apples accumulate in a drum, ready for processing.  A class of primary school children – ten-year-olds, supervised by their teacher Maria Spencer (Saoirse Ronan) – is on a conducted tour of the mill.  Along with the countless apples heading down the chute is a single shoe, which obstructs the machinery and brings production to a halt.  Maria runs in search of the shoe owner.  She and her whole class already know this is Danny (Eddie Waller), the main bad apple of Etzler’s title.

    Those dazzling opening images of fruit pouring into the drum and the mill are a declaration of eye-catching intent.  Etzler’s direction of Bad Apples is overemphatic from the word go.  Introducing him and his film at this London Film Festival screening, Isabel Moir promised the audience ‘a wild ride’ – music to many ears, I guess, but the phrase rang alarm bells in mine.  A year on from Anora, a week on from One Battle After Another, here’s another film fairly described as extremely eventful – extremely, that is, in terms of both the number and the exaggerated staging of incidents.  The rationale seems to be that if viewers are getting their money’s worth with sensational happenings, then what the hell.  I don’t know Rasmus Andersson’s novel – or therefore what it’s saying or how it’s saying it – but Bad Apples is all-stops-out black comedy.  With the help of Chris Roe’s deliberately ominous score, Etzler is soon laying the horror on thick, leaving himself with nowhere to go but further over the top.

    Danny’s behaviour goes from bad to worse.  Maria can’t control him in the classroom.   Nor, at home, can his single-parent father Josh (Robert Emms), a stressed-out delivery driver, as Maria learns from a brief meeting with him, in the light of his son’s latest suspension from school.  When she finds Danny trying to trash her car, Maria has no option but to prevent him by physical force.  Danny is knocked to the ground; anxious to ensure he’s not hurt, Maria drives him to A&E; from the back seat of her car, he says he’ll tell everyone she assaulted him; she turns the car round and drives to her home, where she locks Danny up.  His disappearance and imprisonment, and their consequences, make up the rest of the film.  Danny’s polar opposite in Maria’s class is eccentric, bespectacled Pauline (Nia Brown), who so admires Ms Spencer and is such a keen pupil that, after being pushed downstairs by Danny and taken from school in an ambulance, Pauline is back at her desk the following day.  It’s she who later discovers that Maria has a noisily reluctant house guest.  What Pauline eventually does with that knowledge presents her as another kind of problem child – a sort of explanation of the title’s plural.

    Publicly notorious cases of abduction and domestic imprisonment of minors could render the USP of Bad Apples’ plot tasteless or worse.  In the event, this isn’t a problem – partly because the upside of Etzler’s unsubtle treatment is that you can’t take the material seriously, partly because Danny is so tediously hateful that you feel only relief when he’s shut up physically, if not vocally.  It’s a disappointment that Etzler and the screenwriter, Jess O’Kane, waste the opportunity of turning Danny’s incarceration into sui generis home schooling.  During the rare pacific moments between them, Maria learns to play video football games with Danny – laughably badly in his view – but there’s hardly any attempted reciprocation on her part.  You don’t get much sense of how he spends his days while she’s at work.

    It’s a stroke of luck that Danny’s earlier suspension coincides with an OFSTED inspection, which takes place at twenty-four hours’ notice.  Maria receives a glowing report from the OFSTED man who observes her lesson.  Without Danny’s disruptive influence, her whole class thrives educationally in the weeks that follow.  Maybe some hard-pressed teachers will find the film’s premise grimly amusing – and maybe I’ve watched too much of Channel 4’s Educating Yorkshire in recent weeks – but Etzler and O’Kane’s portrait of the school in Bad Apples is offensively stupid.   It’s not hard to believe that Educating Yorkshire‘s Thornhill Community Academy, under Matthew Burton’s leadership, is unusually enlightened and progressive.  It’s incredible that at Etzler’s Ashton Brook Primary School no support whatsoever is given to either Maria or Danny.  Early on, head teacher Sylvia (Rakie Ayola) warns Maria this is her ‘last chance’ to get a handle on the Danny situation.  Deputy head Sam (Jacob Anderson) – Maria’s ex, who used to share her surprisingly spacious house – is no help either.  She’s isolated from the rest of the staff (and from any human contact outside school).  At the same time, Etzler seems to want to give the impression Maria really isn’t much of a teacher.  She panics in the cider mill.  Introducing the kids to one of her favourite songs (‘On Saturday Afternoons in 1963’ by Rickie Lee Jones), Maria writes the lyrics on the classroom whiteboard without noticing they’re unreadably small.  Her mind on something else, she asks Pauline to occupy Danny’s attention – irresponsible action that leads to Pauline’s being rushed to hospital.

    Bad Apples has it in for just about everyone involved.  It’s at a parents’ evening that Pauline eventually reveals Maria’s terrible secret:  she interrupts proceedings by insisting on singing her version of the school song.  This is a funny sequence, well performed by Nia Brown:  the song has only one verse, which Pauline sings repeatedly but intersperses with a revelatory rap.  What happens next, though, doesn’t make sense, even on the film’s terms.  As Maria hides fearfully from them at the back of the school hall stage, the parents decide they’d like Danny to be kept prisoner:  after all, their own kids’ academic performance has improved since he disappeared.  This might have worked if Ashton Brook had a socially different catchment area and the parents had been caricatured throughout as stop-it-nothing ambitious for their children.  Instead, they’ve been shown, in different ways, to have no time for education.  Pauline’s father, Frank (Sean Gilder), the self-made cider mill owner, regards schooling as pointless and his daughter as a weirdo because she reads books at home.  Josh, struggling on his crap wages to keep a roof over his and Danny’s heads, literally can’t afford the time to deal with his psycho son.  Before Pauline steals the show there, Sylvia has announced to the parents’ evening that Josh is in police custody, suspected of Danny’s murder.  Even in a black comedy context, it’s rather breathtaking that the other parents press for Danny’s continued captivity, knowing full well what has happened to his father.  The fact that Josh, without explanation, is subsequently released, is either a pointless bit of plot or a failure of nerve on the filmmakers’ part.

    Saoirse Ronan tries, for as long as she possibly can, to mine something humanly truthful – something you can sympathise with – from Maria’s predicament, but it’s a hopeless task.  Eddie Waller does as much as can be expected in the crucial yet underdeveloped role of Danny; Nia Brown’s Pauline has the chance to shine more variously and does.  As Sam, Jacob Anderson shows a few flashes of easy wit.  He makes the most of one of the script’s better lines when, after Maria’s OFSTED success, Sam, getting friendly with her again, tells Maria she’s good with outstanding features.  When Josh describes his struggle to cope, Robert Emms is – as usual – excellent.  Emms’ Josh is touchingly hopeless:  his plight matters in a way little else in Bad Apples does, which makes it doubly unfortunate that the film soon forgets about Josh as a person.  Rakie Ayola can’t do anything with Sylvia, who’s inexplicably unpleasant throughout.  At the start, you wonder if she’s meant to be a representative figure – a head teacher left floundering by under-resourcing of her school.  But that wouldn’t explain why, for example, Sylvia is clumsily unkind enough to express astonishment to Maria – in front of other staff – that she fared so well in the OFSTED inspection.

    When Sylvia quits, after the parents’ evening debacle, her departure, in the best tradition of screen resignations, is immediate – as are Sam’s and Maria’s appointments as head and deputy head respectively.  They also resume life as a couple.  Bad Apples cynically says that, when push comes to shove, everyone’s out for themselves.  The closing scene, another gathering in the school hall, sees Ashton Brook’s new regime, and PTA allies, basking in unaccustomed success.  The film’s satire-of-education cloak has long since turned into emperor’s new clothes but Etzler, ever attention-grabbing, supplies a sting in the tail.  Danny finally contrives to escape from his prison.  The closing celebration at the school is intercut with shots of his running along beside a busy main road, presumably en route to Ashton Brook and to exposing all concerned for what they really are.

    Etzler is nothing if not brazen.  As already noted, he makes Danny a pain in the neck from the start, with no hint that there might be good reasons for his bad behaviour.  His selfish anarchy never impresses his classmates, all of whom, except Pauline, apparently loathe him.  Now, having shown everyone else in a negative light, the director presents Danny as a kind of avenging angel-devil – a warning that you ignore a bad apple at your peril.  Never mind that a Danny probably wouldn’t be ignored in the real world, as distinct from the world of Jonatan Etzler.  Bad Apples views nearly every one of its characters as a nasty piece of work.  The phrase it takes one to know one comes to mind.

    11 October 2025

     

  • The Son and the Sea

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stroma Cairns (2025)

    A young man called Jonah gets out of bed and, for the next few screen minutes, experiences a mental horror show, jagged images of the drink-and-drugs-fuelled life that he apparently leads.  Next, Jonah writes himself a to-do list – sort room, sort head, sort life.  The Son and the Sea doesn’t show him delivering on the first of these but the closing implication of Stroma Cairns’ debut feature, screening at the London Film Festival, is that Jonah can tick the second item off the list – and thereby the third!  He manages this by swapping his aimless, putrid existence in present-day London for the bracing air of a Scottish coastal village, where he travels with his mate Lee (Stanley Brock).  Jonah has family there – his great-aunt, Marie – though Cairns and Imogen West, who co-wrote the screenplay with her, don’t give much sense of Jonah’s relationship hitherto with Marie.  She now has dementia and has moved into a care home.  Jonah and Lee stay in her recently vacated house in the village.

    The set-up has echoes of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) – Cairns’ village even has a conspicuous phone box – and Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun (2024).  As in Fingscheidt’s film, the change of scenery doesn’t instantly work its magic on the protagonist.  Jonah and Lee, who’ve spent most of the long train journey from London arguing swearily with each other, continue in the same vein after reaching their destination.  Marie’s house has next to no mod cons.  Jonah and Lee pass the time mostly in the pub since there’s nothing else to do.  When they strike up conversations – with Charlie (Connor Tompkins) and Luke (Lewis Tompkins), deaf twins about the same age as Jonah and Lee, or pre-teen Sandy (Grant Lindsay) – Jonah is notably less friendly than Lee, who’s ready to learn bits of sign language from the twins to help communication with them.  Morose Jonah visits the care home where he finds Marie[1] slumped in a chair and unresponsive.  All in all, life in the village seems as bad as the one he left behind.

    Jonah perks up a bit when he and Lee come across an elderly smallholder, a genial, trusting man who’s happy for the pair to borrow his rowboat for an outing that proves to be the turning point for Jonah.  By now, Luke is in police custody and Charlie, for reasons connected with his brother, has fallen out with Sandy.  Charlie comes on the boat with Jonah and Lee, who rows; Sandy sits alone, cliffside.  It’s a lovely, sunny day and Jonah takes an impromptu, exultant dip in the sea.  A little later, he, Lee and Charlie are clambering round seaweed-slippery rocks, where they find the unconscious body of Sandy, seemingly fallen from some way above.  It’s thanks to Jonah’s insistence that they get the injured boy to hospital.  While waiting there with Lee and Charlie for news, Jonah says a prayer, thanking God for enabling him and his companions to save Sandy, who does indeed pull through.  The next time Jonah visits Marie, his tender voice and touch spark some kind of recognition in her eyes; she is last seen walking slowly down a corridor in the care home, her arm in Jonah’s.  In the film’s closing scene, Jonah, Lee and Charlie head off together in a car, the land-and-seascape magnificent in what is still beautiful weather.  The mood of this finale is thoroughly celebratory.

    Where are they headed – on another day trip, back to London?  The Son and the Sea is puzzling in various ways but it’s clear enough that you’re not meant to ask questions like that.  The film recently had its world premiere at Toronto; the TIFF website explains that Cairns shows ‘three young men … learning, with quiet grace, what it means to grow up’.  According to IMDb, the film describes how ‘connection goes beyond words, and joy can be found despite loss’.  After spewing repetitive profanities for an hour or more, Jonah suddenly switches to thoughtfully worded prayer.  Is the film, with its appealingly allusive title, meant to have religious meaning?  Google’s AI overview is characteristically unequivocal:

    ‘No, The Son and the Sea is not a religious film; rather, it is a journey of self-discovery that uses faith-related touchstones, such as the protagonist’s name, to explore themes of internal growth. While its soundtrack can feel spiritual at times, the film’s message is that redemption comes from within, not from a higher power.’

    I can see it would spoil things (and the film’s chances of high-profile festival screenings) if the answer were ‘Yes’:  after all, ‘religious’ = bad.  ‘Spiritual’ = good but the soundtrack, consisting of songs by the duo Toydrum and Gavin Clark, is purgatory, especially the drippy lyrics, though a folk number performed in a pub by Sandy’s mother is relatively OK:  the singer has a pleasant voice.  It’s important to say that Cairns gets good performances from her cast generally, particularly Jonah West and Connor Tompkins.  As Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant showed in Sian Heder’s CODA (2021), the combination of limited vocals and vigorous signing can make deaf performers in a film unusually expressive.  Connor Tompkins certainly is.

    Stroma Cairns herself was born with impaired hearing and deafness was clearly of great importance to her making the film.  She also mentioned in her introduction to this LFF screening that the story draws on her own family history.  The Son and the Sea is very much a family effort:  Jonah and Imogen West are respectively Cairns’ brother and mother (and the late Gavin Clark was Jonah’s father).  A disability theme, in conjunction with major personal connections to what’s been put on screen, will, for many viewers, disarm criticism of the film.  I can only say I’m not among them.  The deafness element, as represented by Connor Tompkins’ Charlie, is one of The Son and the Sea’s most promising yet the script exasperatingly loses sight of who the character is.  Charlie says he’s scared of water:  how come he goes on the boat with no demurral?  He’s also scared of the prospect of London, which may be his destination at the end.  Is his powerful animus against Sandy simply dispelled by the latter’s accident?  In the film’s closing stages, the role of Lee is probably underwritten more deliberately:  it’s striking that chatty Lee, who knows Jonah better than anyone, is virtually silenced after his pal’s conversion to positive and penitent thinking.  Stroma Cairns stressed how vital it was to her that the film should be subtitled throughout:  she wanted it to be fully accessible to non-hearing as well as hearing audiences.  To put it another way, we can all be equally baffled by The Son and the Sea.

    10 October 2025

    [1] Only a handful of characters are included in the IMDb listing so The Son and the Sea‘s other cast members, Marie included, will have to go unnamed.

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