Elementary errors: "Bad Apples"

A quiet crisis in filmmaking: the industry that once gave the world To Sir with Love, Grange Hill and Clockwork Mice seems to have completely forgotten how schools work. I'm tempted to assign any blame for this to Netflix's hit Sex Education, which taught us that viewers would be willing to accept some mid-Atlantic fantasyland idea of schooling if a show's ultimate curriculum got us onto the good and fun stuff. Since then, we've had last year's floundering Steve, set in a place of education that made no sense whatsoever (two hundred rampaging teenagers in a leafy back of beyond, overseen by four understandably rattled members of staff); now we have the pure piffle of Jonatan Etzler's Bad Apples, relocating the events of a novel by Etzler's fellow Swede Rasmus Lindgren to a British nowhere-in-particular. Former Casualty apprentice Jess O'Kane's script holds to a familiar idea of school as battleground: we meet our heroine - wet-liberal wallflower Maria (Saoirse Ronan) - copping flak from all sides. Her primary problem is marauding malcontent Danny (Eddie Waller), a pre-teen hothead who spends lessons attempting (more often than not successfully) to pick a fight with everyone around him; but Maria is also being harassed and harangued by parents wondering why their little angels aren't receiving the same attention, and by colleagues who insist problem children like Danny are their teacher's responsibility. Ahead of a surprise Ofsted inspection, Maria decides to take special measures: locking Danny up in her spacious basement. There may well be an element of fantasy in here for working teachers crawling out from any marking generated by the long first week of term: the crowd I saw Bad Apples with gave up frequent chuckles of recognition at the sight of, say, a PTA meeting spiralling out of control. Yet the rest of us will spend the film wondering where exactly this school is meant to be, given the myriad accents in play, and how its secondary location - that basement - connects to Maria's improbably lavish home. Is it a shared storage space, as it first appears? If so, isn't Maria in danger of being found out? We end up doing more thinking than any of the creatives who've so obviously dashed the film off.

Steve went for a realism it couldn't sustain because nothing about it was remotely realistic. From the word go here, Etzler can be observed cranking everything - Danny's classroom-trashing tantrums, Maria's flustered responses, Chris Roe's hectoring, florid score - up past eleven, where it might have served everyone better to build gradually and thereby generate some measure of plausibility; it leaves Bad Apples with nowhere to go except off the rails and over the top, and us watching the sorry knock-on effects. Ronan, for one, is obliged to dial down (and occasionally abandon) her usual winning intelligence: her Maria is a klutz and a fumbler, outmanoeuvred by not just one but two kids, and thereafter shown scrabbling around on the hoof - as when she orders a restraining device for Danny that will be delivered by the lad's overworked (thus absent) father (Robert Emms). It's not the only point where the little editorial voice in your brain openly wonders 'is this not a bit too on-the-nose?'. That inner editor has already had enough to quibble with, not least some shaky casting. Waller is credibly snarly - taken in isolation, his might be the most credible performance here - but you soon clock he could easily overpower his diminutive captor. Stephen Graham and Anson Boon were a closer physical match in the recent, not dissimilar The Good Boy - but then that film heeded the lesson that sometimes a thriller needs to abandon realism in order to function as dark comedy; it swapped one logic for another, where this dithers between the two. Bad Apples can't go too dark, because on some level Etzler, O'Kane and Ronan want us to like Maria, and they want us to like Maria because they, too, are operating on the hoof. Yet right through to a school-hall finale that gave me PTSD flashbacks to those godawful Nativity! films, all that approach leaves us with is intensely annoying characters doing incredibly stupid things. Too haphazard to function as the latter-day Hitchcock it was surely pitched as, the film plays like homework someone's done on the bus in, its every twist an emoji shrug of "will this do?" No; no, it really won't. You've let yourselves down, you've let this school down, and - worst of all - you've let the entire British film and TV industry down.

Bad Apples is now playing in cinemas nationwide.