Director: Jonatan Etzler
Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Eddie Waller, Nia Brown
Figures issued by the House of Commons in February of this year reinforce widely-reported statistics that roughly 10% of teachers in the UK quit within the first 12 months, with the figure rising to approximately 30% within the first five years of teaching. This in conjuncture with average state-funded salaries decreasing over the past decade and a rise in cases of pupil aggression and hostility (particularly from young males weened on misogynistic influencers) leaving the remaining teachers belittled and intimidated. Documentaries, papers and even TV shows like The Wire have highlighted how a blinkered focus on test scores contorts the system into a reductive numbers game, and it doesn’t seem to matter which side of the Atlantic you’re hearing this from. With all this swirling around us one is moved to ask who’d be a teacher in this climate of escalating tension and uncertainty. Swedish bright spark Jonatan Etzler’s latest centres on one plucky primary school teacher – Saoirse Ronan’s ‘Miss’ Maria Spencer – in the fictional Westcountry burrough of Ashton Brook and her… unique approach to beating the system borne out of addled desperation.
It’s a tale of entrenched behavioural disorders, vandalism, kidnapping and child endangerment. Also it’s one of the funniest, sparkiest comedies of the year.
Maria’s doing her best, but her Year 5 class is perpetually disrupted by the unchecked aggression of unruly Danny (Eddie Waller), a strong contender for the nastiest little pissant to grace cinema screens this century. This mulleted, Manchester United supporting gobshite wreaks havoc on a field trip to the town’s nearby cider mill, swears perpetually in class and even pushes teacher’s pet Pauline (Nia Brown) over the bannisters in the stairwell, breaking her arm in the process. Unwisely breaking protocols around engaging with pupils off of school grounds, Maria ends up in an altercation with Danny that leads her to lock the boy up in the basement of her sparsely furnished house. Putting aside for a moment the logistics of keeping him that way, or that most UK houses don’t have basements, Maria’s crazed reaction to a wildly out of control situation stems from the stressor of an impending Ofsted inspection. Bad Apples highlights, in this early stretch, an extreme knock-on effect of such internalised pressures.
Here’s the thing, though… Maria’s class drastically and immediately improves. Initially, she has no idea what to do about the boy in her basement, but his removal from the equation seems to benefit all (all but the boy’s overworked, absentee father Josh (Robert Emms) that is…). Against all good sense she decides to perpetuate the scenario, and buys Danny a harness after Googling how to control an 800lb gorilla. She even makes in-roads into home-schooling the ruffian. Bad Apples starts making a strong case for one-on-one engagement with troubled and troublesome children, reinforcing the idea that a one-size-fits-all system does a disservice to all. Still, I wouldn’t leave that kid in a room with my flat screen TV and a video game console.
Ronan sparkles in one of her very best performances (even taking the earnest and heartfelt likes of The Outrun into consideration). Maria is all-too-aware that she’s created a mad situation that she cannot control, and Ronan smartly shares the character’s incredulity with the audience. For what it’s worth, her child co-stars are disarmingly up to the task. Waller is genuinely intimidating, while Brown’s definitely-on-the-spectrum Pauline highlights another kind of disruption; that caused by over-leniency. Once Pauline has the leverage to takeover the classroom, she arguably becomes more of a problem for Maria than Danny ever was. With unexpected depth of feeling, Bad Apples goes on to showcase all three as melancholic outsiders. Danny offers Maria an opportunity to focus on and nurture a (literally) captive audience, but he also provides companionship that’s been starkly lacking since her ex (and colleague) Sam (Jacob Anderson) jilted her.
This nous from screenwriter Jess O’Kane (adapting a source novel from Rasmus Lindgren) extends to a number of pleasingly unexpected narrative swerves, the best of which occurs at a truly unhinged PTA meeting in the movie’s spiralling third act. If Bad Apples wasn’t already a morally ambiguous can of worms, it doubles-down once Pauline performs a literal showstopper on a music department keyboard. It’s here that the movie’s satirical edge is at it’s sharpest, as anyone who’s tried to herd such cats can well atest. It’s a bit of a shame, then, that neither O’Kane or Etzler know quite how to resolve this delectable nest of conundrums. Though one might argue the film finds life in these unresolvable spaces, opportunities to linger and ricochet in the mind long after the credits roll and we’re freed from Chris Roe’s often intrusive overscoring.
Ronan comes out Best in Class, though there are plenty of gold stars to go around. Whether this’ll coax a graduating generation into taking on the classroom is another matter entirely.
The Lost Highway Hotel 