Here is a strange, heavy-handed and unpersuasive black comedy which owes what success it has to the star-power of its lead, Saoirse Ronan, who is incapable of giving an uninteresting performance. Director Jonatan Etzler has adapted it with co-screenwriter Jess O’Kane from a Swedish novel by Rasmus Lindgren called De Oönskade, or The Unwanted, and is a film that asks you to overlook its plot-holes and implausibilities on the grounds that it is a satire – but a satire saying what, exactly?
The scene is a primary school in the English West Country where Maria (Ronan) is a hardworking, idealistic teacher – but her class is hopelessly disrupted by a violent boy, Danny (Eddie Waller), obnoxious and out of control. He seriously injures another pupil, the nerdy teacher’s-pet Pauline (Nia Brown) whom Maria privately considers a bit annoying. After a chaotic visit to Danny’s home, Maria winds up causing the boy to lose consciousness with an accidental chokehold, and in a panic smuggles him back to her house where she imprisons him in her basement. And then, slowly but surely, the rest of the class, freed from Danny’s hateful presence, blossom and Maria gets a glowing Ofsted report. She looks and feels on top of the world. But what is to be done about her shameful secret?
Perhaps only a pedant would point out that an unventilated basement, in which the prisoner’s bathroom necessities are met with a bucket, would soon look and smell horrendous, not clean and tidy, like this – and the same goes for the prisoner, incidentally. And how exactly has Maria induced Danny to wear an animal-restraint harness without knocking him out or using drugs?
The boy-chained-up-in-a-basement movie could almost be a horror/satire sub-genre all on its own, with Jan Komasa’s The Good Boy and Markus Schleinzer’s Michael. But those shockers work because they never make any secret of how monstrous the jailers are, and what the endgame is; they turn the dials up to 11. Bad Apples cautiously turns the dials to four or five, always wanting to keep Ronan’s character relatable and sympathetic evidently because her well-meaning normality is part of the black-comic point. She is only doing what kindly/liberal teachers secretly long to do: ruthlessly eliminate the bad apples. But there isn’t enough comedy or enough shock to distract you from how laborious and unbelievable the whole thing is, particularly in the closing act. At any rate, Ronan is always watchable.
• Bad Apples is in UK and Irish cinemas from 18 September.
