The absurd idea at the center of Bad Apples is actually quite simple: a teacher locks one of her students in her house, and after the boy disappears, her life starts to get better.
Maria does not plan to kidnap Danny. He is the most difficult child in her class. He is aggressive, unpredictable, and takes up almost all of her attention. During one conflict, Maria tries to stop him physically. Danny then threatens to tell people that his teacher has used violence against him. Maria panics. Instead of taking him to the hospital as she originally intended, she takes him home.
From that point on, one mistake leads to another. Maria has to keep doing more in order to hide what she has already done.
If the story only followed this path, Bad Apples would be a dark comedy about an ordinary person getting trapped in her own bad decisions. But the film becomes much more interesting when Maria discovers something unexpected: her mistake works.
Without Danny, the classroom becomes calmer. Maria no longer spends most of her energy dealing with one child. She begins to notice the others. One is good at drawing, another at maths. Children who were previously overlooked finally receive some attention. The class performs better, and Maria finally starts to look like a good teacher. She receives praise and professional recognition. And she clearly enjoys it.
So Maria is no longer only asking herself how to hide what she has done. She is also benefiting from it.
Even at this point, however, I was not completely convinced by the film. Danny is written as such an extreme child that some of the story simply felt too absurd to me. I did not particularly enjoy seeing him disappear, nor did I immediately feel emotionally involved in his captivity.
The satire really started to work for me when the other parents discovered the truth.
They know where Danny is. They know what Maria has done. And they still do not want him back.
Because their own children are doing better.
At this moment, Maria's private wrongdoing becomes a collective choice. The parents are not confused about whether kidnapping a child is wrong. They simply discover that doing the right thing has a cost. If Danny returns, their own children may once again lose Maria's time and attention.
This is where I think the film finds its most uncomfortable question:
What if exclusion actually works?
The film never made me doubt that the adults were wrong. Of course they were. What makes the situation disturbing is that their wrongdoing produces real benefits. The classroom improves. The children learn more. Maria becomes a better teacher. The parents are happier.
“This is wrong” and “this works” are both true.
Once exclusion starts to work, the adults need a way to keep enjoying its benefits without thinking of themselves as people who have sacrificed a child. This is why the foundation later in the film becomes so important.
Danny has become a missing child. People publicly remember him and express concern for him. A respectable story of collective care grows around his disappearance. Yet these same people do not actually want Danny to return.
Strangely, Danny becomes easier to care about once he is gone.
The real Danny disrupts the classroom. He takes up a teacher's time. He affects the other children. He forces the school to deal with a problem it cannot easily solve. Danny as a missing child does none of these things. He can be remembered, pitied and turned into a symbol without asking anyone for actual time, attention or resources.
A real child is difficult. The name of a missing child is much easier to love.
The same contradiction appears, in a more private form, between Maria and Danny. The adults exclude Danny while still being able to think of themselves as caring about him. Maria does not simply lock Danny away and forget about him. She feeds him. She teaches him the lessons he is missing. She comforts him when he is afraid.
At one point Danny breaks down because he fears that nobody cares about him and nobody will come looking for him. Maria tells him that at least she cares, and that she will not leave him.
There is something almost tender about the sentence.
That is also what makes it disturbing.
“I won't leave you” and “I won't let you leave” are true at the same time.
Maria's care does not cancel her coercion. In some ways, it makes the captivity easier to continue. Food, lessons, comfort and companionship slowly create something like an everyday routine inside a relationship that is still based on confinement.
This also connects the private situation in Maria's house to what is happening at school. Once Danny disappears from the classroom, Maria can redistribute her attention to the other students. At the same time, Danny, now confined in her home, receives her most concentrated one-to-one attention.
Violence here does not simply destroy care. It redistributes it.
Maria's private life makes this relationship even more uncomfortable. She lives alone in a large house, and from her conversation with Pauline we learn that this space is connected to a relationship and a shared life she once imagined. That relationship ended, and Maria was left alone.
After Danny enters the house, the empty space slowly fills with meals, lessons, arguments, comfort and company.
I do not think this means that Maria secretly wants a child, or that Danny simply becomes a substitute son. The film does not give us enough evidence for that. But one contradiction is difficult to ignore. Maria is someone who has been left by another person. Danny is a child who fears that nobody cares about him and nobody will come for him.
Maria tells him: I will not leave you.
But one of the ways she makes sure this relationship continues is by taking away Danny's ability to leave her.
When care is no longer enough to make Danny manageable, Maria moves towards much more direct control of his body. Unable to deal with him, she searches online for advice on controlling a large pet. A gorilla even appears in the search. She then buys something like a harness and uses it to restrain Danny.
My reaction to this scene was mostly disbelief. Maria's solution seemed ridiculous.
But that reaction later made me notice something strange. Maria is physically restraining a child, yet while watching the film I still did not naturally think of her as a particularly frightening “violent woman.”
Why?
If Maria were replaced by an adult male teacher, while everything else remained the same, I think the relationship would immediately feel more threatening. A man keeps a young boy in his large house, feeds him, teaches him, comforts him, physically restrains him, and tells him, “At least I care about you. I won't leave you.” The same actions suddenly sound much more disturbing.
But gender cannot explain everything.
Keep Maria and Danny exactly as they are, but film the story as a serious psychological thriller. The basement, the locked doors, the restraint, Danny's father crying outside the house while his missing son is actually inside, and Maria saying “I won't leave you” could all become frightening.
This made me interested in a question that comes before deciding whether Maria has agency or whether she is a “violent woman”:
How does a film make us recognize violence as violence?
A woman can commit a violent act without automatically appearing to us as a “violent woman.” What a character does is one thing. How the film presents it is another. How I experience it as a viewer is yet another.
With Maria, these levels do not completely match. She is a woman, a teacher and a caregiver. At the same time, the film is a black comedy. These things work together, making her actions move strangely between care, discipline, absurdity and coercion.
Maria also does not seem to enjoy controlling Danny itself. At least I never felt that she took pleasure in having power over his body. What she enjoys is what Danny's absence gives her. The classroom becomes manageable. She can finally notice the other children. She is finally recognized as a capable teacher.
Her pleasure comes less from domination than from restored order.
This is also why I kept thinking about the farming game Maria repeatedly plays when she is stressed. She drives a machine forward, crushing or clearing what is in front of her. The film returns to the game several times.
I do not want to turn it into an overly neat symbol. But the game does offer a very simple way of dealing with difficulty:
There is an obstacle. You operate the machine. You clear it. You move on.
Danny cannot actually be “solved” like this. Once Maria removes him from the classroom, he does not disappear. She still has to feed him, teach him, comfort him and control him. A problem that belonged to the school has simply been moved into her private home.
And yet reality begins, strangely, to behave a little like the game.
Danny is removed.
The system works better.
Maria is rewarded.
This brings me back to something that bothered me about Danny from the beginning: does the film itself also turn a complicated person into an obstacle that can be removed?
By the end of the film, I still do not really know what is wrong with Danny.
We know that he attacks people, loses control and disrupts the classroom. But we learn very little about where this behaviour comes from, what has happened to him, or how he understands himself.
There is a reason for making him so extreme. If Danny were simply a slightly difficult child, the parents' wish to keep him away would be too easy to condemn. The film needs his presence to create serious problems for everyone. Only then does the question “What if exclusion works?” become difficult.
But this creates a problem inside the film itself.
Bad Apples criticizes adults for reducing Danny to a problem that should be removed from the system. Yet the film also needs to make Danny into a “problem” in order for its satire to work.
It shows us very clearly why everyone wants Danny gone.
It is much less interested in showing us why Danny became Danny.
For me, this is why the film works better as social satire than as a character drama.
The ending brings this problem back in a very physical way.
Danny breaks through the wall himself.
By this point, Maria has become successful. The school and the parents have built a public story around the “missing Danny.” Maria is standing on stage at the foundation event while the real Danny is running out of her house.
My first reaction was not even, “He is finally free.”
It was:
Now everything is going to come out.
I think that reaction fits the film. At the end, it is not only captivity and freedom that collide. There are also two versions of Danny.
One is the Danny created by the adults around him: the missing child, the object of sympathy, the person a foundation can safely remember.
The other is the real Danny: difficult, angry, impossible to control, demanding of time and resources, and now capable of breaking through a wall and running back into the world.
The first Danny is easy to care about because he no longer disrupts anyone's life.
The second is the child the adults never really knew how to deal with.
So when Danny returns to the world, it is not only Maria's secret that is threatened. The restored order of the school, Maria's identity as a successful teacher, the benefits enjoyed by the parents, and the respectable story everyone has created around a missing child may all collapse with it.
The film begins with a teacher secretly trying to solve the problem of a “bad” child. It ends with that child returning by himself.
By then, the question is no longer what should be done with this “bad apple.”
It is: who gets to decide which apple has to be removed so that everything else can look good again?