| reviews & features | by movie | by theater | film specials | hot links |

Apt Pupil

Apt Pupil is one of the most literate and genuinely creepy movies ever adapted from a Stephen King tale, perhaps because its monster is so real and deceptively ordinary. In a season of movies that make facile connections between the superficiality of suburban life and depraved behavior, Bryan Singer's film returns Hannah Arendt's phrase "banality of evil" to its original sense, describing Nazism as an evil made all the more frightening for our inability to explain its evolution from a seemingly benign seed. As in Singer's previous effort, The Usual Suspects, evil simply exists, and all the good can do is hope to stay out of its way.

Here, evil is not just the friendly neighborhood Nazi but the all-American boy who yearns to know what it feels like to be a mass murderer. The movie doesn't really explain why 16-year-old Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) is fascinated with Nazism, only that he attends a school festooned with vaguely fascist emblems (a pirate skull) and slogans ("Dare to be a leader," printed in a Germanic font) and that he wants to know more than what he believes his history teacher was afraid to mention during a brief lesson on the Holocaust. After doing his own research, Todd recognizes a local recluse, Arthur Denker (Ian McKellen), as Kurt Dussander, a fugitive Nazi war criminal. Todd confronts Dussander and blackmails him, but not for money -- he threatens to expose him unless the old man shares with him the unvarnished accounts of his crimes.

The heart of the movie is the twisted mentor/pupil relationship, which seems figuratively sexual though not literally so. Todd becomes so obsessed with Dussander's stories that his interest in schoolwork, sports, and girls completely droops. Dussander refers to Todd's yen for more tales from the old man's remorseless litany of atrocities -- call it Holo-porn -- as "morbid fascination," but he grows to derive as much grim satisfaction from telling as the boy does from listening. After hearing enough stories, however, Todd learns that he has become, in effect, an accomplice, and that it is Dussander who is exploiting him.

-- Gary Susman