Apt Pupil (1998)

Directed by Bryan Singer. Starring Ian McKellen, Brad Renfro, David Schwimmer, Bruce Davison, Ann Dowd, Joe Morton, Elias Koteas, Joshua Jackson, Heather McComb, Jan Tříska, Michael Byrne, James Karen. [R]

High school student Renfro confronts elderly neighbor McKellen upon discovering that the man is actually a Nazi war criminal under a false name, but Renfro isn’t there to turn him in; instead, he wants McKellen to share stories of his experiences working at concentration camps, to know how it felt to commit genocide. McKellen is chilling but complex as the fugitive Nazi, and the setup is an intriguing one with the way it subverts the standard coming-of-age development arc, but the film succumbs too often to exploitation, contrivances, and predictable horror beats—it’s hard to trust a movie that works hard to be both sick and slick. The motivations of Renfro’s character are also never explained; if it’s a suggestion that the cold blandness of evil can fester within any random person, consider it a poor one within its repeated descents into the details of Holocaust atrocities. Director Singer’s blackly comic and grandly Gothic instincts poorly serve the unpleasant material, but there’s a niggling urge to at least salute the audacity…however, considering the fetishistic visual ingredients, it might not be best to dwell over what kind of salute it would be. Adapted from a Stephen King novella.

45/100