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Nordic humour has a reputation for being dry and very sardonic. Then there is black comedy which is obviously centred around finding amusement in normally serious, often painfully tragic, issues and events.
Imagine what Nordic black comedy must be like then.
Well, do you know what? You don’t have to because Swedish director Jonatan Etzler has given us Bad Apples, a film about a Bristol teacher who finds it so hard to control the poor behaviour of one of the boys in her class that she kidnaps him and locks him in her basement. You know all of those school movies where the kids get up to various antics with an unconventional teacher, things like Nativity and Kindergarten Cop? This mixes aspects of these with a story where a troubled individual finds tentative connection with someone who has gone to extreme measures to deal with their problems. It’s basically School of Stock(holm Syndrome) and as you might imagine with that pedigree, it is fascinating, unrelenting, discomforting, and yes amusing, in almost equal measure.
Another film it put me in mind of is The Drama as things start to spiral out of control after one key event, with the key difference that the crime here is both totally unplanned and actually carried out, but while it starts with similar realism, it does gradually develop into something that feels less true to life. In fact I have a theory that the whole closing chapter might really be the waking fantasy of the central character as she descends deeper into despair and delirium. Either way, events do not develop as you’d expect. Certainly the whole thing plays out like a one hundred minute teacher’s anxiety dream.
Speaking of things that will involuntarily go through the heads of anyone that works in education, there is also a lot here that will major ring safeguarding alarm bells – even beside the central conceit. One time it would be good to see a film in this setting that is made by people who have been employed in a school rather than someone who just used to go to one. Watched as a metaphor or a satire though this does have some interesting points to make.
The two lead performances from Saoirse Ronan as the teacher and newcomer Eddie Waller as the troubled kid are very strong and the storytelling is most certainly confident. There are movies that have explored some of this movie’s ideas better, like The Teacher’s Lounge and The Kindergarten Teacher (definitely not Nativity and Kindergarten Cop), but Bad Apples, with its wry Northern European sensibilities, its UK setting and its noble attempt at a ‘what would you do’ scenario, is a worthwhile lesson in social commentary in Gen Y parenting, post Right Wing Conservative, uber digital, Covid generation childhood, computer gaming, Bezos Britain.
