Bad Apple was one weird fucked up film. I knew from watching the trailer and seeing the billboard ads that it has been described as being darkly comic. It kind of lived up to both descriptions but it was also, in some places, bloody funny.
It makes more sense if you’ve ever worked in a school. The setting and some of the small intricacies played out in staff rooms and interpersonal relationships between teachers were spot on.
The basic premise is that there’s a ahem bad apple pupil at a primary school. In fact he’s a little shit. A right Little shit. It was very difficult to have any sympathy towards the character of Danny.
You did find plenty of empathy and understanding with his poor overstretched young female teacher. It was clear from the setup that she had good intentions and wanted to do her best for all of her pupils, but Danny was something of a lost cause.
tl;dr: After something of a physical assault between the pair, she basically kidnaps him and locks him in her cellar. After a few teething troubles they kind of bond and she does her own version of home schooling, albeit with him pretty much chained to the floor.
It’s a plot that even Grange Hill might have struggled with back in the day.
What was clever about Bad Apples was the way in which the character sympathies shifted throughout the film. Danny becomes something of a lost boy who you want to find his way in life. The lovely lovely teacher is clearly an absolute psycho but somehow just about manages to get away with it.
It gets a little stretched towards the end. The secret is out of the bag and so is Danny, out of the cellar but no one really does anything in order for justice to be carried out.
The ending was disappointing. I hate films that come to a sudden jolt and leave you to make your own mind up about how the narrative should end. That sounds like wimping out to me.
It was a decent way to spend a couple of hours in the Sunny Colch, cheapo cheapo grubby fiver cinema deal. I think if you were a young primary school teacher then you would be having nightmares after watching this film.