APT PUPIL

Well before its release, APT PUPIL has already generated a fair amount of “buzz” in the movie industry about its chilling portrayal of evil in supposedly its purest form, as embodied by National Socialist (Nazi) Germany. Based on a novella by Stephen King, the movie depicts an American high school student, Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), who discovers that a German National Socialist war criminal, Kurt Dussander (Sir Ian McKellen), is living under an alias in his own neighborhood. Fascinated by the Holocaust and the Nazi movement, the boy blackmails the older man into telling him “the stories they’re afraid to tell us in school” – the graphic details of the atrocities carried out upon the Jews. Todd wants to know “why people do what they do,” he explains. As the young student listens raptly to the old man’s graphic accounts, he begins to absorb the evil unleashed by his own intense curiosity and to cultivate his own dormant depravity.

Soon, Todd is spending every afternoon at Dussander’s house; he tells his gullible parents that he reads to his lonely neighbor. The two companions have a seductive hold on one another. Each feeds off the other’s innate corruption. Todd forces the old man to put on a Nazi uniform and march around his kitchen, awakening his long-buried evil proclivities. Soon Dussander, in only the first animal cruelty scene (and what would a Stephen King movie be without animal cruelty?), is trying to bake his neighbor’s cat in the oven.

Dussander’s lurid stories about the gas chambers give Todd nightmares, yet he is obsessed by visions of suffering and cruelty. Gradually the Nazi’s evil infects Todd more and more deeply. His once-stellar grades plummet, he ignores his friends, and he is uninterested in the girls who pursue him. Finally, the evil flowering within him starts to manifest itself outwardly, beginning when he kills a wounded pigeon by smashing it with a basketball.

The pair’s mutual poisoning eventually culminates in a gory, thrill-kill murder. The victim screams, “Why are you doing this?” but his anguished question goes unanswered. The ensuing denouement teases the viewer with the hope that these two cretins will finally meet their just desserts, but in the end evil triumphs, and Dussander has instilled a lasting, malignant legacy in his “apt pupil.”

APT PUPIL is certainly disturbing, but in the end the story is simply classic Stephen King, a scary horror tale with a Nazi twist. The movie fails to adequately explore the Holocaust and its unfathomable evil. It fails to explain “why people do what they do.”

Dussander and his pupil’s evil has no agenda; it is intensely vicious but random, rather than organized and systematic like the Final Solution of the National Socialists. Curiously, the two characters bear no particular malice toward Jews or any other special group. Dussander and Todd are simply two freakish psychopaths who happen to find each other.

It is bothersome that APT PUPIL reduces the Holocaust to a mere horror story; somehow the assumption that National Socialist were simply fantastic monsters seems to cheapen such a horrific era. If Nazis were simply a collection of psychopaths who happened to organize themselves, a recurrence of the Holocaust seems wildly improbable. Such a simplistic presumption is dangerous. While it comforts us to view the Nazis as evil “others” rather than mundanely depraved human beings, the failure to recognize that, without God, we are all vulnerable to the innate darkness in our souls may prevent us from recognizing another germinating genocide. We could easily turn a blind eye to another potential Holocaust, and only realize our folly too late, which is exactly what has happened in places like the Sudan and Rwanda in Africa.

Although APT PUPIL disappoints by failing to rise above mere horror, it does succeed admirably as an example of its genre. While a few scenes are hokey or formulaic (such as the unoriginal, ubiquitous animal cruelty scenes), the movie manages to thoroughly disquiet. The seduction of Todd Bowden is chilling to behold – Brad Renfro’s dead-eyed performance is perfect in its moral emptiness. “All-American” scenes of Todd pitching for his high-school baseball team are frenetically interspersed with scenes of intense depravity. While Dussander describes slowly poisoning his Jewish prey in the gas chambers, Mr. Magoo cartoons and “I Dream of Jeannie” episodes flicker on the TV in the background. The movie’s masterful juxtaposition of innocently mundane symbols of American culture with scenes of senseless violence strikes home as only a skillful horror movie can. Director Bryan Singer’s cinematography, so breathtaking in THE USUAL SUSPECTS, is again in evidence here. His chiaroscuro effects serve to highlight the symbolic tension between light and darkness.

An artistically superior horror movie, APT PUPIL will surely give the viewer nightmares. Regrettably, it misses a chance to do more. A weighty subject like the Holocaust deserves better.