Bad Apples: Honest Review — Is It Worth Watching? | 7.5/10

Bad Apples is a sly, uncomfortable watch that trusts you to squirm without looking away. Jonatan Etzler has made something genuinely clever about how quickly a good person can rationalize terrible choices, and it mostly lands with the precision of a dropped brick through a window.

Bad Apples: The plot (no spoilers)

Bad Apples follows a primary school teacher drowning in the quiet desperation of her job when a student gets injured on her watch. What begins as a sympathetic moment of panic spirals into a series of increasingly questionable decisions that feel alarmingly plausible, like watching someone construct a philosophy of self-preservation one lie at a time.

The film operates in that delicious space between dark comedy and psychological thriller where you’re never quite sure if you should laugh or feel nauseated. Etzler’s debut feature keeps the tone deliberately unstable, which works better than it has any right to—the UK setting feels appropriately claustrophobic, and the script refuses easy answers about culpability or redemption.

Acting & direction

Saoirse Ronan deserves most of the oxygen here, and she doesn’t waste it. She plays the teacher with the kind of fractured desperation that makes you believe in her moral unraveling, never playing her as outright villainous but as fundamentally human in the worst ways. Jacob Anderson provides solid, understated support as a colleague caught in her orbit, and the ensemble around them feels lived-in rather than performed.

Etzler’s direction is assured without being flashy—he understands that the scariest moments often happen in ordinary rooms with ordinary lighting. The pacing occasionally drags when the film seems uncertain whether to lean into thriller mechanics or satirize them, but the cinematography maintains a kind of suffocating naturalism that keeps you pinned to the seat. The score stays quiet, letting dialogue and silence do the heavy lifting.

The strengths

• Ronan’s performance is a masterclass in barely-contained panic—she makes moral compromise look like a slow-motion car crash you can’t turn away from.
• The script resists the urge to soften its protagonist or provide cathartic comeuppance, instead sitting with the uncomfortable truth that some people just get away with things.
• The film moves with genuine momentum during its second act, where each lie compounds into something genuinely tense rather than melodramatic.

The weaknesses

• The third act loses confidence in its own premise and starts reaching for thriller beats that feel borrowed from better films, undermining the specificity that made the first half work.
• Some supporting characters feel thinly sketched, which works for atmosphere but occasionally leaves scenes feeling like they’re just marking time until the next significant beat lands.

Who should watch it

If you loved Promising Young Woman for its moral ambiguity or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri for its refusal to condemn anyone cleanly, the movie will scratch that itch. This is for viewers who appreciate character-driven thrillers that don’t need jump scares or plot twists to generate genuine unease. Expect discomfort; expect to argue about it afterward.

Final verdict

Bad Apples is a legitimately accomplished debut that stumbles slightly when it doubts itself but mostly delivers exactly what the premise promises—a portrait of how quickly someone can become unrecognizable to themselves when the pressure gets high enough. Ronan carries it with intelligence and a kind of exhausted desperation that feels earned. It’s not perfect, and the final stretch plays it safer than the material deserves, but it’s absolutely worth your time if you like your psychological thrillers served with a side of genuine human weakness rather than movie-villain monologuing. Seven and a half out of ten.