Bad Apples Review: BFI London Film Festival 2025

The kids aren’t alright in audacious school satire Bad Apples

When people think of movies that make you afraid of children, they probably name classic horrors like The Omen or The Shining as the top of their list. Yet it’s really stuff like Netflix’s Adolescence and releases like Jonatan Etzler’s dark comedy Bad Apples that teach us that kids are hell. Absolute hell. This is a movie that will reaffirm the decisions of every childfree by choice person who watches it. A true nightmare.

In scenes that will be familiar to anyone who knows any teacher in the UK school system, Saoirse Ronan’s Maria (or simply ‘’Miss’’ as she’s called by most of the people in her life) is miles out of her depth. Attempting to teach a class of 30 year 6 pupils in a small town in the South West, her efforts are constantly being thwarted by one student with behavioural issues. 11-year-old Danny is genuinely violent; he assaults his classmates, smashes up the classroom, swears and shouts at Maria, and none of the disciplinary consequences mean anything to him.

When Maria asks the school head for extra resources to help with Danny, or suggests that maybe he’d be better off in a different school, she’s told that there is no money for this, and she’ll just have to deal with him. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, she makes a series of really bad decisions that may revolutionise her classroom atmosphere for the better, but risk landing her in seriously hot water if anyone finds out.

And while Maria has been so focused on what to do with troublemaker Danny, she hasn’t noticed how close one of her other pupils, the goody two-shoes Pauline, is getting to her. Pauline’s somewhat creepy obsession with Maria and belief that she’s more than just her teacher, she’s her best friend, soon sees the little girl practically stalking her outside of school. Soon, this second difficult pupil/teacher relationship has just as much risk of destroying Maria’s life as the first.

The English language debut for Swedish director Jonaton Etzler, Bad Apples Is a dark satire that really pushes its players to some outrageously uncomfortable but hilarious places. Not just playing with the idea of ‘one bad apple ruins the barrel’, it also toys with ideas about how children are able to manipulate adults just as much as the adults try to control them. I went into this film completely blind and could not in a million years have imagined where it would go.

Saoirse Ronan is, of course, absolutely superb as the harried teacher driven to horrendous acts. She fills her performance with moments of light and shade, and it is particularly fun to see this meek and well-meaning woman discover that maybe, just maybe, she likes doing bad things after all. The two young child actors playing Danny and Pauline, Eddie Waller and Nia Brown, are both excellent too, terrific finds for a film that hangs so heavily on our ability to believe that children can hold such terrifying power.

Some decisions taken in the third act do ultimately take Bad Apples from being a twisted but believable story into something more absurd, but it does all wrap up into an enormous amount of fun, even if it feels like a step too far. As guilty as you might feel for laughing at a film about mistreating children, laugh you certainly will – and in this case, the kids totally deserve it.

Bad Apples is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival. A UK cinema release is expected later this year

Check out more reviews from the 2025 London Film Festival here