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Apt Pupil
USA, 1998
[Bryan Singer]
Ian McKellan, Brad Renfro, David Schwimmer, Elias Koteas
Drama / Thriller
  
When a director of the quality of Bryan Singer decides to choose a script based off a novella by Stephen King, who also wrote The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, as his follow-up to the critically acclaimed and hugely successful The Usual Suspects, then you know that you're on to a very good thing. Apt Pupil is a film I have wanted to see ever since I heard about it and whilst not in the same class as any of the above-mentioned films it's still a cut above the rest and an excellent insight into the power of charismatic evil and what it can do to a man.

Brad Renfro is Todd Bowden, a young man who becomes obsessed by the Holocaust and reads into it as much as he can. When on the bus one day he notices an old, weary gentleman and instantly recognises him as a wanted Nazi war criminal, a man who has been on the run for 40 years and knows more about what happened at such places as Auschwitz and Belsen than anyone else alive.

His research leads him to the house of Kurt Dussander (McKellen) but instead of handing him straight over to the police or the Isreali's he blackmails him into telling all about what he did during that terrible period.
What follows is a subtle game of cat and mouse, with the two main characters slowly becoming friends, Renfro's personality changing as the sheer horror of McKellen's past begins to warp him, and eventually with the tables being turned and desperation setting in. The film doesn't run long enough to give a complete study into what is an incredibly complex and sinister psychological issue but the slight and continuous degredation of both men into the very thing both had striven so hard not to be is excellent.

Following the rule that all Germans must now be played by English thespians (Jeremy Irons in
Die Hard with a Vengeance for instance), McKellen gives a superb performance as the tired, forgotton Dussander whose reluctant retelling of his sinister past reawakens his immoral beliefs whilst corrupting his young captor. Renfro is also good as the quiet and highly intelligent Bowden whose arrogance and over-confidence becomes a serious, and eventually deadly, weakness.

A disturbing movie which, when watched alongside
American History X, is bound to shake a few feathers, it nonetheless captivated me and gave a very mature journey into the heart of darkness, never over-judging but always sticking to the fact that the Holocaust was a terrible moment in human history and that some things are best left buried.
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