While it has been a little over 30 years since South Africa dismantled its horrifying regime of apartheid, the traumas and wounds left by more than half a century of institutionalized racism and segregation continue to be deeply felt. For those born after it was dismantled, meanwhile, the responsibility to learn and reckon with this shameful history cannot be shirked. As a new addition to the canon of anti-apartheid art, The Smell of Apples, the third feature from director John Trengove, arrives with that educational and historical imperative already embedded within its framework. Adapted from the 1993 novel of the same name by the late Tanzanian writer Mark Behr, the film is less interested in explaining apartheid than in dramatizing how its ideology seeps into everyday life, shaping the perceptions of those privileged enough to experience its violence at a remove.
Set in Cape Town in 1974, the story follows the white, affluent Erasmus family over five fateful days as the Christmas holidays approach and the children are on break from school. Eleven-year-old Marnus (Dawian van der Westhuizen) is excited about his new toy car set and hopes to have his best friend Frikkie (Wian Carstens) over as much as possible. His elder sister Ilse (Karoline Watson) dutifully takes piano and voice lessons from their mother Leonor (Maude Sandham), herself an accomplished operatic singer before settling into domestic life. The family patriarch, Johan (Hilton Pelser), is now an army general but still finds time to bond with his family, while the family’s Black housekeeper, Doreen (Celeste Matthews Wannenburgh), keeps everything running smoothly behind the scenes.
On the surface, the Erasmus clan appears to be an ideal family unit: an aspirational idyll insulated from the ugliness beyond its walls. But, of course, things are not what they seem. First, Marnus cannot find his favourite fishing rod, inherited from his grandfather. He unexpectedly encounters Doreen’s grandson Neville (Courtlin Baron) in the house one afternoon and later overhears Doreen telling her friends about Neville’s suspension from school for petty theft. Could there be a connection? Soon after the rod disappears, a mysterious Chilean whom Johan enigmatically refers to as “Mr. Smith from New York” arrives on the family’s doorstep. He is friendly enough, but what are we to make of his cryptic political conversations with Johan behind closed doors? Sheltered, privileged, and unconsciously shaped by the prejudices of his society, Marnus quietly observes these strange occurrences and draws his own one-sided conclusions, until one evening he makes a baseless accusation that inevitably sets in motion a journey toward darker revelations—ones few children his age should ever have to confront.
The basic formula—a child’s eyes gradually opening to the banal evils surrounding him—is well-worn, and The Smell of Apples slots itself into that mould with considerable skill. What elevates it is Trengove’s sensitive direction and his instinct for resisting explicit didacticism. Rather than bluntly explaining the horrors of apartheid to us, he allows them to accumulate almost imperceptibly, surfacing through stark symbolism, tonal dissonance, and sudden bursts of devastating emotion. The film’s most effective moments operate precisely this way. The piano accompaniment to South Africa’s national anthem during a school ceremony becomes garbled with errors as the player stews in newfound realizations. An anguished cry rings out from below as horrific news is delivered while another character vainly frets over a misjudged hairdo. A character skins his knees on an unseen rock while fruitlessly trying to reel in a fish, tainting the clear ocean water with blood. A pointed excerpt from Moby-Dick prompts someone to spill red wine across another’s white shirt. A series of picture slides, accidentally jumbled out of order, powerfully and inadvertently juxtaposes the growth of a family with images of unthinkable atrocities.
These moments reveal the film’s central strategy: Apartheid is most frightening not when it announces itself, but when its violence becomes indistinguishable from the mundane rhythms of privileged domestic life. Trengove repeatedly allows horror to intrude upon scenes that would otherwise seem innocuous, forcing the audience to recognize the proximity between comfort and cruelty. The effect is deliberately incremental. Terrors of all shapes and sizes sneak up on us much as they sneak up on the characters, and particularly on Marnus, whose sheltered worldview leaves him unequipped to understand the machinery of violence in which his family is complicit. Everyone—viewer and viewed alike—is ultimately left with the same imperative: to confront, to reckon, to agonize, or, in some cases, to willfully ignore.
Trengove’s decision to keep the insidious effects of apartheid percolating just out of reach, always present but only gradually perceived, inevitably recalls what Jonathan Glazer accomplished in The Zone of Interest. Both films understand that atrocity can be rendered more disturbing by placing it at the edges of perception, allowing ordinary life to continue alongside it with horrifying normality. The comparison is ultimately somewhat unfair, however, because Trengove treats Behr’s novel as a relatively faithful source, whereas Glazer radically reworked Martin Amis’s book, distilling it into something closer to a spiritual essence than a conventional adaptation. One wonders whether The Smell of Apples might have benefited from a similarly liberated approach, particularly in the final stretch.
This is where the late-breaking twist, from which the film’s title derives, feels conspicuously out of step with the carefully calibrated ambiguity that precedes it. Rather than deepening the film’s meditations on complicity, privilege, and inherited violence, the revelation lands as something more literal and sensational. This is especially frustrating since the earlier ruptures are so effective precisely because they are integrated into the film’s broader symbolic architecture. Those moments unsettle us while allowing their meanings to reverberate beyond the immediate scene. The final revelation, by contrast, feels empty, morbid, and unseemly, the lack of meaningful follow-through making it seem less like a culmination than an appended shock.
And yet, even as The Smell of Apples stumbles toward its conclusion, there is no denying the potency of what comes before. At its best, Trengove’s film hauntingly resurrects the deeply ingrained pain of South Africa’s apartheid past by showing how a system of institutionalized cruelty can become normalized within the seemingly ordinary spaces of family, childhood, education, and privilege. Its greatest achievement is not simply reminding us of what happened, but showing how easily those who benefit from an oppressive system can remain insulated from understanding its true costs. That is a history worth remembering—and, more importantly, one that demands to be reckoned with.
The Smell of Apples had its world premiere at TIFF in the Platform programme on Friday, September 11, 2026.
The Lonely Film Critic 