Bad Apples (2026) Review: Etzler's Chilling Debut

Maria (Saoirse Ronan) teaches primary school, and her class contains Danny (Eddie Waller), a small boy with an enormous vocabulary of profanity and a genuine talent for violence. The school's response is a shrug and a stack of incident forms. Her colleagues counsel patience. Her partner Sam (Jacob Anderson) suggests she let it go. Nobody wants to be the adult who makes a scene.

So Maria makes one anyway - an intervention so drastic, so publicly embarrassing, that you spend the following hour unsure whether you are watching a woman finally doing the right thing or a woman committing a slow-motion crime. What she uncovers in the aftermath isn't a conspiracy so much as a culture: a community that would rather let a child terrorize a classroom than admit something is wrong next door. Sylvia (Rakie Ayola) and Frank (Sean Gilder) represent the older generation's studied obliviousness; Pauline (Nia Brown) is the friend who agrees with Maria privately and disappears publicly; PC Williams (Kerry Howard) is authority in its most shrugging form. The plot is small. The implications are not.

The title is doing double duty, and Etzler knows it. Bad apples spoil the bunch - but the film's real subject is the bunch, and the ease with which it decides the apple was never part of it. What begins as a comedy of escalating absurdity shades, almost imperceptibly, into a thriller about complicity. The genius of the screenplay is that nothing supernatural or even especially criminal has to happen. Ordinary people simply keep choosing calm over truth, and the film lets that choice accumulate until it feels like a threat.

Ronan has rarely been better. She's playing exhaustion rather than rage, and the performance is all the more frightening for it - Maria is not a vigilante, she's a woman running out of exits. Eddie Waller, as Danny, is a genuine discovery; he never plays the kid as a monster, which makes him infinitely worse. Anderson gives Sam a warmth that gradually reveals its own passive edge, while Ayola and Gilder turn genteel deflection into a contact sport. It's an ensemble of enablers, and every one of them is recognisable.

Etzler's direction is confident and unshowy. He trusts silences, lets awkwardness sit past the point of comfort, and stages the film's escalating set pieces with the timing of a stand-up and the dread of a home-invasion movie. The editing keeps the comedy brisk even when the subject turns sour. If there's a wobble, it's in the final act, where the script reaches for a resolution slightly tidier than the mess it has so carefully built - you may want the film to stay angry a little longer. But it's a minor complaint against a major piece of work.

What lingers is the diagnosis. This is a movie about communities that mistake silence for safety, and it arrives with the precision of a well-aimed slap. It's streaming now, and it deserves to be argued about at dinner tables for months.

Pros

• Saoirse Ronan's coiled, weary performance anchors every tonal shift
• A script that mines genuine laughs from genuine dread without breaking either
• Eddie Waller's Danny is a career-making child performance - unnervingly human
• Etzler's direction trusts silence, discomfort and the audience's intelligence
• Sharp supporting turns, particularly Rakie Ayola and Kerry Howard

Cons

• The third act resolves a little more neatly than the setup warrants
• Some viewers will find the comedy-thriller gear changes jarring
• A few supporting characters hover at the edge of caricature

Bad Apples is the rare film that works as both a brisk Friday-night watch and a genuinely unsettling piece of social observation. It asks a simple, awful question: how much would your neighbourhood overlook to keep the peace? The answer, delivered with a smile and a cup of tea, is: almost everything. Strong 7.5 out of 10 - and the strongest argument yet that Etzler's English-language career is worth watching closely.