TIFTY TWOFERS: TIFF 2025 REVIEWS
These two films comedically and creatively take the modern Western educational system to task, revealing how a system claiming to be rooted in equal access and accommodation cannot succeed when that system is denied the support it needs to care for ‘troubled’ children.
By Tamar Hanstke
The conception of the bad apple–the child given every opportunity to succeed and shed their baser impulses, yet proves fundamentally incapable of doing so–has existed for time immemorial; and yet, as explored in Jan Komasa’s Good Boy and Jonatan Etzler’s Bad Apples, contemporary Western educators face an increasingly Herculean expectation to work magic on these so-called “bad apples”. Indeed, child psychology has made many breakthroughs in proving that there are likely no intrinsically ‘bad’ children, and that even the most seemingly unreachable children are often operating under damaging external forces–such as parental abuse, or poverty and other forms of structural marginalization–or unaddressed internal factors–such as neurodivergence, or burgeoning genetic and/or environmentally-motivated mental illnesses. The most palatable and heartwarming framing of this new research promises us that every child has the capacity to succeed if provided with the right support. This responsibility of attaining additional support is then, at a structural and political level, often unceremoniously dropped onto parents, who are often already stretched to their limits in trying to provide for their child(ren) under late-stage capitalism; or, in cases of parental neglect and abuse, these parents may themselves be the unaddressed root cause of their child(ren)’s need for additional support. Educators, meanwhile, are caught in the middle of this tug-of-war, simultaneously denied the financial and legal resources they need to adequately support ‘difficult’ children, while also being blamed for not performing miracles within a hopelessly broken educational system. In Good Boy and Bad Apples, we see the manifestation of these tensions in two shocking and discomforting explorations of a grotesque pedagogy of violence arising in the absence of resources being provided for a better alternative.
Beginning with Good Boy, this dark comedy occupies an almost fantastical world in which the whole of reality outside of the central family home ceases to exist. Clearly drawing inspiration from A Clockwork Orange, we begin the film with a chaotic montage of the life of a brash, aimless, and frequently violent young man named Tommy (played by Anson Boon), who is abruptly drugged and abducted, awakening to an entirely new life as a chained prisoner of a seemingly normal family. We slowly learn of the father of the house (Stephen Graham)’s guiding pedagogical aims, including forcing Tommy to listen to “calming” classical music and recorded lectures on self-improvement. Tommy’s increasing docility is further rewarded with little treats, such as getting to watch a movie upstairs with the family—though still chained up to prevent escape, of course. While this ‘treatment’ is successful in getting Tommy to sober up, and he slowly becomes more self-aware of how his past behaviours have harmed others, he holds on to his fighting spirit, always on the lookout for potential avenues of escape.
While the film develops the claustrophobic family home as an enclosed world unto itself, the director still takes care to show that the father, similarly to the scenario presented in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, is not simply a religious or moralist fanatic gone too far, but is quite aware of how he is manipulating others, chiefly to benefit himself. At the beginning of the film, he intentionally hires a woman who is overstaying her international work permit in the UK, knowing full well that her desperation to remain in the UK will buy her silence regarding the imprisoned young man in the basement. When the maid does grow increasingly concerned for Tommy’s well-being, the father explicitly blackmails her to stay quiet, lest he should report her whereabouts to the authorities. In this way, whatever “success” might appear to arise from the father’s methods, it remains clear that he is a self-serving and sanctimonious ‘teacher’, and his methods are rooted in the further marginalization of people whose problems he could never truly understand.
While I will not spoil the ending of the film, I will note that it was the last 5-10 minutes that left me somewhat ambivalent to the film as a whole, despite greatly appreciating its trajectory up to that point. While Good Boy is rife with shocking acts of cruelty, the ending seems to emerge out of an underlying theme of intergenerational trauma that is simply not developed enough to earn a sincere emotional response from the ending– rather, it comes off more as shocking for the sake of it, to get the audience talking and debating as they leave the theatre, even though the narrative preceding it would surely have already offered enough food for thought.
Going into Bad Apples, my full knowledge of the film derived from the one-sentence press blurb about a teacher struggling to manage a problem child in her classroom, and so I was surprised to witness essentially the same premise playing out as in Good Boy, only with a very different cinematic style and ending message. Saoirse Ronan has been widely hailed as one of the greatest young actresses working today, and she further cements her reputation with a performance that initially seems akin to many of the talented, creative, yet overly naive and people-pleasing young women she has played before–yet, as the film goes on, her character Maria subtly begins to morph into something much darker, pushed to her personal and professional limits until she breaks in a way that cannot be seen from the outside, internal damage invisibly cutting away at her vital organs. This damage is set into motion by Danny (impressively played by child actor Eddie Waller), a ‘bad apple’ of the highest order, disrupting every single classroom session and even outright committing violence against his peers until they resent him just as much as their teacher does. After an opening incident in which Danny disrupts a school field trip to an apple factory, Maria outright asks her school superior for additional support for Danny, such as a support worker to be with him in the classroom. Her request is sharply rebuked, as she is told there is no money for such a thing– Maria must find a way to manage Danny, and face the professional consequences if she fails.
I have been fascinated to see a healthy discourse of pushback against the film for being overly cruel and cynical in the portrayal of Maria’s treatment of Danny. To my mind, that early exchange about the lack of school resources to support Danny is key to the film’s larger message: While the audience is certainly witness to cruel and unusual treatment of Danny, as he, like Tommy in Good Boy, ends up chained and imprisoned in a basement, none of this would likely have happened if Maria had been provided with the extra support she asked for in the first place. Over the course of the film, we see firsthand the negative impact Danny’s behaviour has had on his classmates, and how their collective mental health improves during his absence. And for Danny’s part, deprived of the ability to enact cruelty on others, and aided by personalized educational support from Maria, he also begins to improve, learning to read and developing emotional self-regulation.
Like Good Boy, however, this film is clearly not positing a teacher’s imprisonment of a child as an effective mode of pedagogy, even at an ironic or darkly comedic register. Danny never loses the fighting spirit that compels him to seek new avenues for possible escape, and as wholly unlikable as Danny was at the beginning of the film, he slowly emerges as the only character who retains the possibility for redemption. Indeed, it is not that Danny seems guaranteed to live a happy and reformed life were he to escape, but rather that as everyone around him gradually abandons their sense of morality, Danny at least retains the capacity to grow and change if he ever does manage to regain his freedom. In this way, the opening of the film, rather cheekily taking place at an apple factory where we watch a sneaker– later revealed to be Danny’s– travelling through the factory’s complex machinery among countless apples, becomes a rather unsubtle visual metaphor that Danny is not really the singular bad apple at all, but rather the obtrusive sneaker that gums up the social machine, finally revealing that it is everyone around him that has simply been hiding their rotten cores from the world (hence the title, Bad Apples, plural). In this way, the audience finally comes to ask: If Danny is capable of real growth within the horrific situation of being imprisoned in his teacher’s basement, what might he be capable of with adequate educational support within normal, healthy classroom conditions?
Ultimately, these two films comedically and creatively take the modern Western educational system to task, revealing how a system claiming to be rooted in equal access and accommodation cannot succeed when that system is denied the support it needs to care for ‘troubled’ children. It is, instead, those very children and their underpaid, overworked educators—often, much like Saoirse Ronan’s teacher, genuinely caring people who eventually either burn out or act out under the impossible load of responsibility they are expected to carry alone—who must suffer the consequences of this impossibly broken system. As disturbing as both of these films might be, particularly Bad Apples, perhaps it is the very discomfort of seeing the extreme end results of our failing educational system literalized that might compel us to act, holding our political systems responsible for how they continue to fail the next generation of children like Tommy and Danny.
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