'Smell of Apples': Apartheid Privilege Through Boy's Eyes — SkimNews
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- John Trengove directed "The Smell of Apples," adapting Mark Behr's well-regarded 1993 novel into a sun-soaked portrait of mid-1970s affluent Afrikaner family life seen through 11-year-old Marnus Erasmus (Dawian van der Westhuizen).
- Hilton Pelser plays Marnus's father Johan, South Africa's youngest Army general, who covertly hosts Chilean Army general Alejandro Goic—a fresh figure from the Pinochet coup—for consultations beyond the boy's understanding.
- Maude Sandham plays mother Leonor, whose composure is tested by the film's climactic slideshow that haphazardly alternates benign family snaps with photographic evidence of Johan's war crimes.
- The adaptation strips away Behr's structural foreshadowing and flash-forwards to Marnus's adult Border War service, keeping queer themes subtextual where the novel was explicit—creating "a state of forced family stability" rather than the novel's culminating transgression.
- Celeste Matthews Wannenburgh plays Doreen, the family's black live-in maid whose orphaned teenage grandson Neville (Courtlin Baron) is made unwelcome by Johan, in a role the review says encapsulates the upstairs-downstairs racial hierarchies the film deliberately only glances at.
- "The Smell of Apples" joins Oliver Hermanus's "Moffie" and Embeth Davidtz's "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" in focusing on white people inside the Apartheid bubble—a "discomfiting and not especially fashionable" framing the review argues is the point.
- The film marks Trengove's South African homecoming after his U.S.-set "Manodrome" with Jesse Eisenberg, resuming the toxic-masculinity and queer-subtext preoccupations of his Sundance-winning debut "The Wound."
Why it matters: By adapting Behr's widely-taught 1993 novel for the screen, Trengove offers South African classrooms and international festivals a stripped-down, subtextual take on white complicity inside the Apartheid bubble—one that deliberately refuses easy moral resolution, mirroring recent Afrikaner-focused films like "Moffie" and "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight."
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