Bad Apples (2025) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Bad Apples ⭐⭐⭐⭐

A struggling primary school teacher begins to make some questionable decisions after one of her students is injured.

There is something wonderfully uncomfortable about a film that makes you laugh while knowing perfectly well that you probably shouldn’t.

Bad Apples did that to me quite a lot.

Perhaps because it’s a world that feels particularly close to home. I have a son at school, I’m a school governor too, and I talk to teachers all the time. I know how much of their job involves dealing with things they didn’t necessarily sign up for.

You might be brilliant at teaching your subject and passing on your enthusiasm, but that doesn’t automatically prepare you for bullying, constant disruption, and a classroom where one child makes it almost impossible for anyone else to learn.

Add an impending Ofsted inspection, and you can practically feel the blood pressure rising.

As it happens, I’m attending a governors’ meeting tomorrow to prepare for exactly that. An interesting moment to watch this particular film.

Saoirse Ronan plays a teacher whose efforts are constantly undermined by one spectacularly disruptive pupil. She can’t slap him, of course, even if the film occasionally makes you wish she could — which probably tells you something about how successfully it draws you into her frustration.

Instead, through a series of increasingly bad decisions, she ends up effectively kidnapping him.

And suddenly, the classroom starts to work.

The other children can finally be heard. They can respond to the lessons, express themselves and learn without somebody constantly shouting over them.

That, for me, is where the film becomes really interesting.

Beneath the outrageous premise is a rather uncomfortable question about how far we’re willing to go to give children the best possible education. As parents or teachers, how much might we be prepared to overlook if our own child were benefiting?

I won’t say much more about where the film takes that idea. Part of the pleasure is discovering just how unhinged it’s prepared to become.

Ronan is wonderful. She has developed into an actress who seems capable of making almost anything work, and here you can follow every step by which her character gets herself into this enormous mess.

Up to a point, each terrible decision makes sense to her, and you understand how she arrives at the next one.

The boy playing her “little bastard” is very good too.

Of course, hardly any of this is remotely plausible. But dark comic thrillers don’t need to behave like documentaries. What matters is whether they obey their own internal logic, and that’s where Bad Apples occasionally wobbles.

My main reservation, though, is the final stretch.

The film loses momentum, seems unsure how far to push its darkness and doesn’t quite know when to finish. There’s a feeling of several possible endings competing with one another.

I wish it had trusted its nastier instincts a little more and embraced its satire more fully.

That’s frustrating because this came very close, for me, to being something exceptional.

I think it says more about exhausted teachers and a failing system than it’s perhaps being given credit for.

It’s original, surprising, shocking and very funny. It made me think, and I had a deliciously uncomfortable time watching it.

Tomorrow’s governors’ meeting should be interesting.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and runs a monthly film club at Chiswick Cinema.