Saoirse Ronan’s latest character makes one terrible mistake — then has a chance to undo it. In Bad Apples, she plays Maria, a primary-school teacher whose class is slipping out of control. A particularly disruptive 11-year-old pushes her patience to the limit. When she accidentally locks him inside her home, the other children suddenly start doing better. That is where the comedy turns uncomfortable.
The film opens in limited U.S. theaters on September 18, 2026. It already screened as the opening film of the New Directors section at the 2025 San Sebastián Film Festival, so this is a theatrical release for a movie that some festival audiences have seen — not a brand-new production that was only announced this week.
A school story that gets darker with every choice
Maria wants to do right by her pupils and keep her career on track. The trailer shows how quickly those goals become harder to separate from her own panic. When one child disappears, the classroom seems calmer, but people outside the school are still looking for him. The joke is not that what she did is fine; it is that Maria can see the easy way out and keeps moving closer to it.
Jonatan Etzler directs from a script by Jess O’Kane. The festival describes the British film as a sharp satire with a suspenseful edge, and the trailer plays with that mix. One moment Maria is trying to hold a normal lesson. In the next, a quiet room or an unexpected visitor feels like a warning that she cannot keep the secret much longer.
Who plays whom?
Ronan leads a cast that also includes Jacob Anderson, Eddie Waller, Nia Brown, Rakie Ayola, Robert Emms and Sean Gilder. Eddie Waller plays Danny, the child at the center of Maria’s dilemma. The story needs that part to be more than a plot device: the longer Maria delays doing the right thing, the more the audience has to sit with what happened to him.
Pulse Films produced the movie, and Republic Pictures is its U.S. distributor. Nea Asphäll shot it; Robert Krantz edited it; Chris Roe composed the music. San Sebastián listed a 99-minute running time, a compact fit for a comedy that begins with one bad decision and lets the consequences spread.
The title asks who the bad apple really is. The unruly student may be the easiest answer at the start, but the trailer keeps its focus on the adult who knows exactly what is wrong and struggles to admit it. Ronan gives Maria the anxious look of someone who can still choose to come clean, even as every scene makes that choice harder.
If you are choosing a movie this weekend, expect a darkly funny setup rather than a gentle classroom drama. The official synopsis and trailer reveal Maria’s predicament, not how she resolves it. That is the part worth discovering in the theater.
The premise, cast, credits and release details are on our Bad Apples movie page.
