10.23.98 06:41:22
Stephen King novella brings chill to the big screen

Apt Pupil
**** (out of five)
Starring Ian McKellen, Brad Renfro, Bruce Davison, Elias Koteas, Joe Morton, David Schwimmer. A TriStar Pictures release written by Brando Boyce from the novella by Stephen King, directed by Bryan Singer. Rated R, contains violence, profanity, drug use. Running time: 110 minutes.

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

The film made of Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil turns out to be more chilling and eerie than most films made from the horror master's other works, even though it doesn't involve zombies or pet cemeteries or cars that have minds of their own.

It's about a smart teenage boy who discovers that his neighbor is a Nazi war criminal who has been hiding out from Israeli authorities for years in the guise of a bumbling old man who wouldn't hurt a fly.

Now it's 1984 and Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen), who calls himself Arthur, lives alone in a rambling house whose cluttered and moldy insides bear no relation to the fancy digs used for the exterior shots. But that's not what piques the curiosity of Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro). It's the similarity in appearance to old photos he has dug up in researching Nazi war atrocities for a school project. Soon he has dusted Arthur's mailbox and found his prints match those of the old Nazi war criminal.

Instead of calling in the authorities, however, Todd blackmails the wheezing, chain-smoking old man. Todd tells him that he'll keep his secret in exchange for his gruesome stories about the inhuman to-the-death experiments performed on Nazi victims. Soon those stories are being graphically related across a kitchen table.

The old man and the boy begin to bond as time goes by, at least until Arthur/Kurt turns the tables and institutes his own blackmail against the boy. Suddenly the trapper finds himself snared in his own trap. Or is he? The plot moves back and forth between these two cunning adversaries, who keep running into surprise trip-ups with the outcome never certain.

Director Bryan Singer proved himself a master of the kind of mind games played here in his table-turning thriller The Usual Suspects, and longtime friend Brandon Boyce has come up with a script that suits him fine -- edgy and grimly fascinating.

In Apt Pupil's most unnerving scene, Todd orders Arthur/Kurt to dress up in a Nazi SS uniform and parade around the kitchen in a march, something the old man takes a liking to too easily and readily. But it's not only the old Nazi's hidden instincts coming out of the closet that are frightening. So is the fact that we wonder what Todd's almost sensual interest is in the moment. For the first time, there's fire in his eyes, and the uncomfortable feeling that Apt Pupil is about to get kinky.

It's McKellen's strong performance -- alternately coddling and cozy, with brash lightning strokes of anger -- that keeps the film afloat. A star of the British theater, McKellen makes Arthur/Kurt so scarily unsettling because he is so ordinary and so, outwardly at least, pleasantly non-threatening.

The film's weak link is Todd's character. Although Renfro gives him a cunning and soulless streak, I wish we had more to go on in figuring out why Todd has been so shaped by a morbid curiosity with Nazi atrocities that he must toy with this old war criminal. It is an amoral character, although that's the point of the film's eeriest moments. Todd, like the man he has caught, enjoys inflicting pain.

The middle of Apt Pupil -- one of the year's worst titles -- threatens to bog down in the same-old same-old as it details the relationship between the old man and the boy. While they come to an understanding and even camaraderie, the old man helping the boy get over a problem at school, there's still a gap between them that has been forged by distrust.

But then something horrible happens when a homeless man gets on the wrong side of the old man and the film takes off in a new direction. Actually, there are a couple of endings to the film, which is not over until it's over, although not in the sense of the usual "surprise'' ending of most horror films, where a supposedly dead character turns up for one last scare.

No. What we have in Apt Pupil is much more chilling and ominous than some trick moment. And that's what makes it so creepily memorable.

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