And we watch as his influence rubs off on Todd. At first disgusted, Dussander soon warms to his storyteller role, reliving (in more ways than one) his unspeakable past. He recognizes Dussander from old photographs, and he strikes a deal with the old man: Todd will keep quiet if Dussander will regale Todd with stories of what really happened in the death camps - all the gory details they leave out in school. Apt Pupil would be well-crafted without McKellen with him, it’s haunting - a true horror movie.ĭussander, posing as “Arthur Denker,” is visited one day by Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), a straight-A student with an unnatural interest in the Holocaust. It also has a master to cut the cord from King’s book and slap it into its own chilling life: Ian McKellen as Kurt Dussander, the Blood Fiend of Patin, a Nazi war criminal hiding in the peaceful, leafy suburbs. Plagued by delays, legal hassles, and the problems of the material itself, this film has had the longest, most difficult pregnancy in recent memory.įortunately, Apt Pupil has two skillful sets of hands to deliver it: director Bryan Singer (who made the coolly intricate puzzle The Usual Suspects) and first-time screenwriter Brandon Boyce, a Singer associate who acted in Singer’s 1992 debut Public Access. At least one set of adapters took a whack at it, and were only eleven days away from a wrap before the plug was pulled and the film shelved. (The fourth story, “The Breathing Method,” remains unfilmed - and probably unfilmable.) Of the three, Apt Pupil is easily the riskiest and toughest, both as a story in itself and as a challenge for filmmakers. ![]() ![]() Stephen King’s Different Seasons, his 1982 collection of novellas, has yielded three fine movies: Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and now Apt Pupil.
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