A black comedy that’s more of a charcoal than a true, pitch-dark Vantablack, Bad Apples stars Saoirse Ronan as an exhausted teacher working in a typically underfunded British elementary school, who resorts to desperate, foolish measures to deal with a difficult student (Eddie Waller, a real discovery in his first-ever role). While Ronan, in fine comic form here, has been acting since she was a kid herself, most of the above-the-line staff are relative newcomers. That includes Swedish sophomore director Jonatan Etzler (One More Time) making his first English-language feature, and screenwriter Jess O’Kane, adapting Swedish novel De Oonsade by Rasmus Lindgren.

Although the relocation of a very Nordic communitarian milieu to a British setting creates its own cultural dissonances, the end result is a nifty ethical puzzle about balancing the needs of individuals versus those of the community. Still, it’s best not to take the plot too seriously given the wild implausibilities that come into play in the third act.

Ronan’s Maria, whose soft Irish accent marks her as a bit of an outsider already, teaches 10-year-old kids at Ashton Brook Primary, an unremarkable elementary school in an unnamed Somerset town in southwestern England. As the film starts, Maria is first met supervising a class trip to the local cider factory owned by local burgher Frank (Sean Gilder), whose daughter Pauline (Nia Brown) is in Maria’s class. But as Frank holds forth about cider production, we can see someone has dropped a hi-top sneaker in among the apples working their way through the production line. Given surly loner Danny (Waller) is wearing only one shoe, it’s pretty obvious who the culprit is, but he runs off when Maria tries to chase him down.

Later, back at school, Maria remonstrates with Sylvia (Rakie Ayola), the school’s headteacher (the equivalent of a principal), that she needs help dealing with Danny. But Sylvia insists there’s no budget for a classroom assistant and that it’s Maria’s job anyway to handle disruptive behavior and control her class. In class, Danny continues to be disorderly, challenging Maria’s authority, throwing stuff when angry, completely distracting and even frightening the other students.

Finally, when he pushes Pauline over a stair banister, breaking her arm, Sylvia finally suspends Danny from class. Unfortunately, he can’t be prevented from coming back to school if Maria can’t communicate the situation to Danny’s single father Josh (Robert Emms), a delivery driver constantly at work and seemingly fed up with his son getting into trouble.

At the depot out of which Josh works, he drives off before Maria can even tell him about the suspension. When she turns around and finds Danny vandalizing her car, Maria tries to pin him down to control him, although the stress position she ends up holding the kid in looks suspiciously like the posture Derek Chauvin held George Floyd in, with lethal consequences. Danny passes out, but luckily doesn’t die. Even so, when he comes to as Maria is just pulling into a hospital, his first words promise that he will tell the police what she did, guaranteeing she will get in trouble and probably lose her job. Suddenly panicked, Maria turns the car around and heads back to her boxy, modernist house with Danny and locks him in her basement.

So far, all that is almost all moderately credible, although as a parent and a former school governor myself, I can attest that most schools and local authorities would more likely put the blame on Sylvia the headteacher for this situation. In the real world, she would, or should, be trying to get Danny transferred to a school that could meet his needs or even seeing if the child could be taken into care, instead of putting the onus on hapless Maria.

But Bad Apples is clearly not really interested in pedagogic realism. Instead, it starts out as a faint satire on the perils of permissive, child-focused education before making some even stranger, darker turns as the situation evolves.

It would be a shame to spoil the unexpected detours the script makes. So let’s just stay that the middle act sees Maria keeping Danny a prisoner in the basement, hooking him up in a harness to restrict his movements, but gradually breaking through to him with persistence and the kind of extra attention it’s clear he’s always needed, not just from his own father. It soon emerges, for example, that somehow Danny has been disguising the fact that he’s never learned to read, which partly explains why he’s so bored and frustrated in class.

Meanwhile, with him out of the classroom, the other kids in Maria’s group can finally start to concentrate on their work, and the school does very well when there’s a surprise government inspection, with Maria singled out for praise (another verisimilitude fail, as individual teachers are never discussed directly in real-world Ofsted reports). Maria’s relationship with Sylvia improves, as well as with the deputy head Sam (Jacob Anderson, completely unrecognizable from his Game of Thrones era), with whom Maria used to be in a romantic relationship. Everyone’s a winner, in fact! Apart, that is, from poor Danny. And Josh, who pours his guilt into a publicity campaign to try and find his missing son.

Like a mad sociological experiment trying to test the principles of Jeremy Bentham and his belief that the “greatest happiness of the greatest number… is the measure of right and wrong,” the film follows things through to a logical but bleak conclusion. It’s at this point that the casting of the usually so likable Ronan really makes a difference as the dark turn of events forces the viewer to question their sympathies. Likewise, young Waller proves a revelation, capable of communicating Danny’s vulnerability and brutishness on the turn of a dime. Whether the accomplishment of his performance is the result of natural talent or great direction from Etzler or both will only be revealed if he keeps up with acting.

But clearly Etzler has a real knack with child performers, as he gets truly spontaneous turns from all the young ones in the cast, plus a subtle and sly show from Brown as crafty Pauline, the class nerd who clearly has a crush on Maria but is nowhere near as bovine as she first appears to be. If it weren’t for the fact that Bad Apples ends on just the right note of bleak resolution, one would almost yearn for a sequel where Pauline and Danny square off or fall in love or burn the school down altogether.