Apt Pupil [1998]

Bryan Singer's first feature, Public Access, was almost a non-supernatural adaptation of Stephen King's novel Needful Things, with a sinister but attractive stranger in town using a cable television talk slot to bring out all the suppressed nastinesses of the apparently archetypal good citizens. Apt Pupil, Singer's follow-up to the breakthrough of The Usual Suspects, is a return to King territory, adapted - as were Rob Reiner's Stand By Me and Frank Darabont's The Shawshank Redemption - from a novella in the 1982 collection Different Seasons. King's first attempt to emerge from his self-created modern horror genre and essay more ambitious literary efforts, this assembly [unfortunately capped off by the dreadful 'The Breathing Method'] has the feeling of raw America, stripping naked the everyday horrors King usually has to dress up with vampires and ghosts to get to grips with. Though one of the best things King has ever written, 'Apt Pupil' has proved problematic for would-be adaptors - an earlier filming, starring Ricky Shroeder and Nicol Williamson, was abandoned incomplete after financing fell through.

Given that the story could be reduced to two people spinning stories that feed each other's fantasies and which are sometimes more persuasive when least truthful, it would have been natural for Singer to mount the material exactly in the style of The Usual Suspects, with dramatisations of Dussander's yarns and Todd's tales of detective work. However, he refuses to dramatise even the most truthful anecdotes - Todd's explanation that he has identified Dussander through fingerprints sounds unlikely, but is later confirmed by a throwaway shot - and relies on getting close to two remarkable performances to convey the shifting fascination between Nazi war criminal and all-American boy, ranging from mutual torture to mutual seduction. We get surprisingly few extraneous scenes of Todd's life away from Dussander, though we sense the slipping of his normal relationships in an argument with his best buddy and a failed tryst with his high school sweetheart, and Singer prunes away much extraneous material from the novella, which ends with an exposed Todd becoming a freeway sniper.

What is most admirable about the film is how genuinely complicated its central relationship is. It is heavily signified, not only in the casting of Sir Ian McKellen, that there is a gay undertone to the attraction between retired mass murderer and often-shirtless teenage boy. But the significance of the scene when Todd's girlfriend can't arouse him and wonders if he might not be interested in girls is that his awareness of horror has blotted out all kinds of sexuality, as when a possibly homo-erotic shower scene dissolves as Todd imagines himself looking not at chubbily healthy football players but shrunken and cowed camp inmates. Even more explicitly, Dussander dupes Archie into thinking he intends to take sexual advantage of him while actually distracting the man so he can reach for a knife. This scene, which features a weird cameo from Elias Koteas in an extraordinary jumper as the tramp / hustler, climaxes with a classic dialogue exchange as Archie offers his body with 'don't worry, I've done this before' and Dussander slips in the blade with a sad, self-amused 'so have I.'

The patterns of power between the two central characters, each of whom puppet-masters the other with some success, are beyond sexual. The film is deeply disturbing not only in the effective but obvious scene as Todd makes the old man put on a theatrical costumier's Nazi uniform like a little girl playing with a Klaus Barbie Doll, but in the creepily folksy interview scene as Dussander's Grandpa Walton act persuades the school counsellor to give Todd a chance to get back on track. Though anchored in the holocaust, Dussander represents a larger, possibly Satanic, European evil that finds its younger successor in Todd's All-American high school valedictorian. There is never any discussion of why Dussander became a Nazi or indeed of his politics and beliefs; he is just a plausible monster, recognising that Todd has the potential to be just like him. It is a credit to McKellen's sly, sad, sinister playing that the role never becomes melodramatic, and that Singer can pull off a shattering scene as Dussander's aged hospital neighbour [Jan Triska] is reduced to a terrified child by the mere realisation of who the man in the next bed is.

Apt Pupil lacks the flamboyance in the telling that made The Usual Suspects an audience favourite, but it is a highly assured piece of storytelling, confident enough to elide its worst horrors with a few brief speeches. It may well not find the favour which greeted the comparatively warm-hearted Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, both hymns to human endurance and courage, but it is the purest cinematic adaptation of a strain of true dread that even Stephen King is usually afraid to confront. Singer borrows a tiny trick from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining that reduces King's stream of pop culture references to weirdly disjointed and off-putting snippets from junk television that are somehow disturbing in this context: Mr Magoo, I Dream of Jeannie, The Jeffersons. It is set in 1984 simply because it is impossible to conceive of a Nazi senior enough to command a concentration camp as anything but a senile invalid in the present day, but the finale - as Todd stitches up bewildered guidance counsellor French, played by David Schwimmer with a caterpillar moustache, using a mix of cajolement and threat he has not learned from Dussander but found in himself - does pose the truly terrifying question of what that kid is up to these days.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Sight & Sound June 1999 [UK]

Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com