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