Apt Pupil is a 1998 American
thriller film directed by
Bryan Singer and starring
Ian McKellen and
Brad Renfro. It is based on the 1982
novella of the same name by
Stephen King. In the 1980s in southern California, high school student Todd Bowden (Renfro) discovers fugitive
Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander (McKellen) living in his neighborhood under the pseudonym Arthur Denker. Bowden, obsessed with Nazism and acts of the Holocaust, persuades Dussander to share his stories, and their relationship stirs malice in each of them.