{"id":902191,"date":"2026-09-19T22:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T22:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/902191\/"},"modified":"2026-09-19T22:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T22:46:10","slug":"the-smell-of-apples-review-a-chilling-view-of-apartheid-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/902191\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Smell of Apples’ Review: A Chilling View of Apartheid Privilege"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEvery surface period detail is present and correct to an eerie degree in \u201cThe Smell of Apples<\/a>\u201c: the gawkily short seasonal school uniforms, the ickily patterned kitchen tiles, the garden chairs like steel satellite dishes, the orange-and-brown daisy print that anyone of a certain age will recognize from sundry towels, mattresses and beach umbrellas. Production designer Birrie Le Roux has crafted a pristine one-way time capsule to mid-1970s white South Africa; DP Lennert Hillege shoots it to softly lit, summer-burnt perfection. But there\u2019s not a whisper of nostalgia to \u201cThe Smell of Apples,\u201d director John Trengove<\/a>\u2018s slowly, then suddenly, piercing evocation of affluent Afrikaner family life in that era, and the litany of egregious abuses and inequalities propping it up. It\u2019s told through the eyes of a na\u00efve 11-year-old boy, but there\u2019s no halo to his innocence \u2014 just a growing awareness of how much he doesn\u2019t know, none of it good.<\/p>\n

\n\tDrawn from a well-regarded 1993 novel by Mark Behr that has become a popular set text in South African schools and universities, \u201cThe Smell of Apples\u201d joins other recent literary adaptations like Oliver Hermanus\u2019 \u201cMoffie\u201d and Embeth Davidtz\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Let\u2019s Go to the Dogs Tonight\u201d in articulating the experiences of white people living inside an Apartheid bubble just on the verge of bursting. It\u2019s a discomfiting and not especially fashionable point of focus; as in those films, we get only deliberately glancing, peripheral views of the black majority, their anguish never openly voiced. But these glaring blind spots, however hard to watch, are the point. \u201cThe Smell of Apples\u201d intelligently demonstrates the effortful compartmentalization and denial that kept a system of white supremacy in place.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a successful homecoming for Trengove, the Johannesburger who made a searing feature debut with the Sundance prizewinner \u201cThe Wound,\u201d about ritual initiation and repressed sexuality in the traditional Xhosa community, before heading to the U.S. for his Jesse Eisenberg-starring follow-up \u201cManodrome,\u201d a commendably ambitious but stifled manosphere study. \u201cThe Smell of Apples\u201d resumes those films\u2019 preoccupation with toxic masculine influence across generations, as well as their queer framing \u2014 though in a surprising departure from the novel, the latter is restricted to subtextual intimations.<\/p>\n

\n\tIndeed, Trengove and co-writer Christopher Ciancimino\u2019s impressively minimalist adaptation strips away much of Behr\u2019s structural foreshadowing and underlining, including the novel\u2019s flash-forwards to the child protagonist\u2019s adult military service in the South African Border War. As it is, there\u2019s an ample sense on screen of the plunging darkness toward which the country is headed, before any kind of dawn can establish itself, while it\u2019s impossible not to feel the military\u2019s past, present and future stranglehold on young Marnus Erasmus (Dawian van der Westhuizen, a real talent) at every turn. The only son of Johan (Hilton Pelser), the country\u2019s youngest Army general, Marnus has a world of macho Afrikaner ideology to live up to, but already the boy, timid and fair and small for his age, suspects he might be a disappointment.<\/p>\n

\n\tJohan generally treats Marnus with bluff good humor, though you can see the anxious scrutiny with which he sizes his son up \u2014 and when that worry gets the better of him, it emerges violently. Marnus\u2019 best friend Frikkie (Wian Carstens) is a strapping, bullish lad, and when he\u2019s over, which is often, Johan tends to treat him like another, stronger son \u2014 Marnus may feel a little frozen out by their bond, but he\u2019s too shy and stoic to say so. \u201cA father looks at his sons and sees his own shortcomings,\u201d says enigmatic houseguest Mr. Smith (Alejandro Goic) to Marnus, and that\u2019s no great comfort. Nor is Mr. Smith himself: a Chilean Army general, fresh from his role in the Pinochet coup, with whom Johan is covertly consulting about matters beyond Marnus\u2019 understanding. <\/p>\n

\n\tHis homemaker mother Leonor (a superb Maude Sandham) and his 17-year-old sister Ilse (Karoline Watson) complete the immaculate family portrait, but there\u2019s unrest there too. Ilse, a high-flyer at her conservative Afrikaans high school, is gradually catching wise to her father\u2019s entitlement and cruelty, and to the injustices of the Apartheid government; Leonor puts on a brave face as she projects exactly the image her husband needs her to, but is unnerved by the barbed critiques of her liberal sister Karla (Inge Beckmann), who, by Johan\u2019s decree, is not welcome in the family\u2019s rambling, lushly landscaped Cape Town home. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe person who keeps that home shipshape, of course, is not Leonor but Doreen (Celeste Matthews Wannenburgh), the family\u2019s black live-in maid \u2014 a longtime fixture whom Marnus takes too much for granted to fully realize his emotional attachment to her. (Her routine pet name for him is kleinbaas, which translates as \u201clittle boss,\u201d and it\u2019s said with weary affection but no irony.) The family, of course, would say Doreen is a valued part of the household, though her place in it is made quite clear when her orphaned teenage grandson Neville (Courtlin Baron) arrives to stay in her servants\u2019 quarters, and is made most unwelcome by the master of the house. An exquisitely composed shot of Doreen, slumped in the kitchen half-light as she eavesdrops on the family\u2019s dining-room discussion of Neville\u2019s fate, encapsulates a world of upstairs-downstairs, black-white hierarchies.<\/p>\n

\n\tOver a tight five-day timeline \u2014 as Marnus and Ilse finish school ahead of the December holidays, and the family prepares for their summer vacation \u2014 these various tensions impact one another in tacit but perhaps terminal ways. Some are mere faultlines, others crack into unavoidable conflicts, though they collectively unmask the ugly face of authority in South Africa in ways even the young, fanciful Marnus can\u2019t blithely look past. The sins of the father are ultimately presented in a literal, stomach-churning slideshow that haphazardly alternates benign family snaps with gleeful photographic evidence of Johan\u2019s war crimes. <\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a queasy climactic setpiece \u2014 one that tests, in particular, the brittle wifely composure so precisely enacted by Sandham \u2014 though matters here don\u2019t come quite as tidily to a head as they do in Behr\u2019s novel, which culminated in a shocking act of transgression that you sense may be afoot in the film, though it\u2019s never confirmed. \u201cThe Smell of Apples\u201d isn\u2019t less powerful for this elision: It works toward a state of forced family stability, everyone that bit more frightened and mistrusting of each other, but held stiffly in place by their own privilege and power. You can feel Trengove\u2019s film, so beautifully crafted and impeccably paced, sometimes bristling against its own fine construction \u2014 anticipating the destruction of this walled-off, deeply ugly idyll.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every surface period detail is present and correct to an eerie degree in \u201cThe Smell of Apples\u201c: the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":902192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,303275,337,312047,2559],"class_list":["post-902191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-john-trengove","tag-movies","tag-the-smell-of-apples","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/902192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}