By Jason Osiason

Bad Apples left me uneasy in a way I did not expect. Saoirse Ronan plays Maria Doyle, a primary school teacher on the edge of collapse. She is exhausted, underpaid, and surrounded by children who seem more feral than innocent. The one who finally breaks her is Danny Collins, played by Eddie Waller, a ten year old nightmare who taunts, hits, and manipulates everyone around him. The film starts as dark comedy and slowly slides into something uglier. By the end I felt more disturbed than entertained.

There is a point where Maria stops teaching and starts punishing. The movie builds to that moment like a dare. When she locks Danny in her basement, it stops being satire and becomes something hateful. I could feel the audience turning with it. A few people even laughed when she threw him out of class, and it hit me that the film was playing with something dangerous. It seemed to be testing how far people would go before admitting they were watching cruelty. It wants to make you complicit, but it does not have enough empathy or control to earn that.

I found it hard to tell what kind of movie it was trying to be. Sometimes it feels like a horror film, other times a social drama, and then suddenly a twisted character study. It flirts with interesting ideas about burnout and how teachers are abandoned by the systems that rely on them, but it never digs deep enough. You keep waiting for a reason behind Maria’s breakdown, something that makes sense of the spiral, but the movie just lets her keep falling. There is no real story, just escalation. It builds and builds and then fizzles into a cold, anticlimactic ending.

Ronan gives a strong performance. She finds real pain inside the role, even when the script gives her nothing to work with. You can see the exhaustion in every movement, the quiet panic behind her eyes. Eddie Waller is disturbingly good as Danny. He captures that kind of chaos that feels both real and impossible to control. When they share the screen the tension is unbearable, and that is when the movie works.

The problem is that it is all tone and no heart. It wants to shock more than it wants to understand. The violence feels empty and the cynicism runs deep. It is not thrilling or insightful, just mean spirited. I get that it is supposed to make you squirm, but I never felt the point of that discomfort. It kept asking me to be horrified without giving me a reason to care.

Still, I have to admit there are moments that land. The classroom scenes feel real and messy. The pacing is tight. The production design and sound work create a claustrophobic mood that lingers. Ronan holds it together with pure intensity. There is craft here, even if it is buried under a bad attitude.

Bad Apples is cold, bitter, and occasionally brilliant. It wants to say something about cruelty and control but ends up trapped inside its own cynicism. It is not a total failure, but it is a film that mistakes discomfort for depth. I left it impressed by the performances but unsure why I had to sit through so much hate to get there. [C]