Bad Apples review: 'not much for Saoirse Ronan to sink her teeth into'

Bad Apples | Contributed

Bad Apples (15) ★★

Starring Saoirse Ronan as an idealistic primary school teacher who goes to extreme lengths to deal with a disruptive student, Bad Apples pitches itself headlong into the realm of silliness almost from the off with a twisted plot so divorced from its own nebulous reality any wider satirical points are dulled on impact.

Initially stacking the dice in favour of Ronan’s Maria, a timid, tired, recently dumped P6 teacher at a school somewhere in the West Country, the film presents her ten-year-old nemesis Danny (Eddy Waller) as the sort of feral rage-bomb who’ll explode at anyone to provoke a reaction in the full knowledge the school is largely powerless to do anything about him. Consequently, everyone has washed their hands of him, including the headteacher, who duly informs Maria that if she can’t control him she’ll lose her job – a bogus bit of plot motivation that would promptly be solved with a call to Maria’s union rep.

But we’re not dealing with reality here, so when Danny is subsequently suspended for throwing brown-nosing fellow pupil Pauline (Nia Brown) over the top railings of a flight of stairs – miraculously only breaking her arm in the process and not warranting a visit from the police to the school – Maria is so convinced he’ll come back to class the next day and ruin her make-or-break Ofsted inspection that she embarks on an escalating series of questionable decisions that end with her kidnapping Danny and locking him up in her basement. At which point the film morphs into a glib black comedy cross between Dangerous Minds, Room and Election and proves as tonally all over the place as those comparisons suggest.

READ MORE: Pressure review: 'an old-fashioned war film'

With Maria and the other kids flourishing without the disruptive Danny in class and Danny, in turn, surprisingly responsive to Maria’s more extreme approach to his ongoing education, everything about the film feels ill-wrought, including the sycophantic Pauline’s transformation into a more passive-aggressive bad seed. A bolder, sharper, funnier and more subversive film might also have used Maria’s demonstrably poor teaching skills – she doesn’t even realise one of her pupils is illiterate – to satirise the underlying narcissism of the inspirational teacher trope, something that in turn might have given an actor of Ronan’s stature much more to sink her teeth into. Instead all we’re left with are tiresome comic scenarios with no consequences and a kind of noncommittal fence-sitting inquiry into who the real bad apples might be.

Bad Apples is on general release from 18 September

The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today

Enjoying the Arts & Culture journalism on scotsman.com? Make it easier to find by selecting us as a preferred Google source

Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here