Toronto 2026 Review: THE SMELL OF APPLES, Subtle, Unsettling Coming-of-Age Drama Under Apartheid

After Manodrome, South African filmmaker John Trengove adapts Mark Behr’s 1993 novel The Smell of Apples.

The coming-of-age drama, set in 1970s South Africa and looking at apartheid through the eyes of 11-year-old white boy Marnus, seemingly has little in common with the toxic masculinity and repressed queer desire of Manodrome. Yet both motifs emerge here as well, albeit far more coyly, one under particularly unsettling circumstances. Rather than repeating his previous film’s frontal approach, Trengove folds similar preoccupations into a child’s gradual apprehension of the adult world around him.

Marnus (Dawian van der Westhuizen) lives in a seeming family idyll, part of a nuclear family with his caring father Johan (Hilton Pelser), who spends considerable time with him, his teenage sister Ilse (Karoline Watson), and his mother Leonor (Maude Sandham), Johan’s trophy wife and a professional opera singer who has left her career behind to become a stay-at-home wife in their Cape Town villa. The Erasmus family has one more almost-family member, Doreen (Celeste Matthews Wannenburgh), who takes care of virtually all the domestic work, from cooking to cleaning. She is a warm, elderly Black woman with whom Marnus shares an emotional bond, though he remains largely unaware of the racial and class structures determining their relationship.

Trengove co-wrote the script with Christopher Ciancimino, and they employ a five-day narrative framework leading up to the summer holidays as events escalate inside the Erasmus household and Marnus faces a rude awakening. Two seemingly unrelated circumstances begin exerting pressure on the family. Doreen’s orphaned teenage grandson Neville (Courtlin Baron) lingers around the property, though he is not allowed inside, while the mysterious Mr. Smith (Alejandro Goic), a Chilean general arriving in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s coup, comes to spend several nights with the family of one of South Africa’s youngest generals.

Smith carries himself not as an obvious monster but as a charismatic and cultivated guest, which adds another deceptive layer to the household’s apparent normality. He and Johan retreat into conversations whose precise purpose remains outside Marnus’ comprehension, although their military and political implications are legible enough to the audience.

When a fishing rod belonging to Johan’s father goes missing, Marnus accuses Neville, who is subsequently driven away, setting in motion a tragedy that begins to open the boy’s eyes. Meanwhile, fragments of Johan and Smith’s conversations suggest an impending conflict that Marnus can register only in the vaguest terms.

The Smell of Apples maintains an almost carefree summer atmosphere, despite everything bubbling underneath, much of which Marnus is simply unable to decode. The film derives a substantial portion of its unease from that discrepancy. The audience understands considerably more about the racial, military and sexual structures surrounding the boy than he does, while Trengove keeps the camera tethered to a consciousness for which these structures still appear as ordinary features of everyday life.

What Marnus does begin to notice is that his best friend Frikkie (Wian Carstens), who frequently spends time at the Erasmus home, increasingly earns his father’s approval. Frikkie is stronger, swims better and can pull a fish from the water with ease, qualities Johan appreciates. An almost father-son bond begins to develop between the two, much to Marnus’ chagrin. Marnus desperately wants his father’s approval according to the same masculine standards, despite being smaller, physically awkward and less naturally adept.

Marnus observes everything through the limits of a child’s comprehension, which makes The Smell of Apples increasingly uncomfortable beneath its idyllic façade. Across the five days, however, those limits begin to shift. He does not suddenly acquire a political understanding of apartheid; rather, he starts noticing that the world does not operate according to the same rules for everyone. The differences between himself and Neville or between his family and Doreen become increasingly difficult to overlook.

The accusation against Neville becomes one of the first ruptures in that protected worldview. What Marnus initially regards as a simple question of guilt and punishment reveals an imbalance whose implications he cannot yet entirely articulate. Trengove does not need to explain apartheid to him  or to turn the film into an overt political lesson because its machinery is already embedded in the apparently mundane arrangements of the household.

Within Marnus’ isolated and privileged bubble, nothing initially appears overtly wrong or evil. The sociopolitical apparatus operates above his head and, more importantly, through customs he has learned to regard as natural. Doreen cooks and cleans. Neville remains outside. His father commands respect. A visiting general is simply an interesting guest. The audience can attach historical and moral meaning to these arrangements long before Marnus can.

Trengove and Ciancimino consequently use the father-son dynamic as the central axis of Marnus’ partial awakening, approaching it in almost psychoanalytic terms through the collapse of paternal idealization. Johan is not merely Marnus’ father but the person through whom the boy organizes his understanding of authority, masculinity and the wider world. Discovering that the father is fallible or perhaps considerably worse than fallible necessarily threatens the coherence of everything surrounding him.

Johan’s apparent preference for Frikkie therefore hurts Marnus on more than a childish level. He strives to become the son he believes his father wants, internalizing the physical and masculine qualities that appear to command Johan’s admiration. Yet considerably more is taking place beneath the surface, which Trengove and Ciancimino withhold until one evening, when Johan shows Mr. Smith, Marnus and Frikkie photographs from his military service that have accidentally become mixed together with family snapshots.

The resulting sequence creates a chilling collision between images of the children as newborns and nostalgic family memories on one hand, and photographs of war crimes committed against Black people on the other. The obscenity lies partly in the casual proximity of the two. For the audience, the contradiction has long been forming. For Marnus, it is another crack in an image of his father that until now seemed complete.

What follows is another incident connected to the film’s title, one that Trengove has prepared much more obliquely. Where the military photographs make one form of violence suddenly visible, this second revelation belongs to the more intimate terrain the film has kept buried beneath gestures of paternal affection, masculine mentorship and domestic respectability. It becomes the point at which Marnus’ accumulated suspicions, jealousies and half-understood observations can no longer be contained within the innocent logic through which he has interpreted the preceding five days.

Trengove ultimately delivers an intriguing coming-of-age drama about the loss of innocence under apartheid, marked by a keen attention to period detail and a political context that remains largely implied rather than overtly articulated. The film is less interested in explaining the machinery of the regime than in registering the social disparities it produces, particularly the gulf between the protected existence of a privileged white family and the restricted lives of the Black people around them.

By filtering this world through Marnus’ still-naive perspective, and by using the father-son relationship to gradually puncture his sense of familial idyll and paternal idealism, Trengove allows the political to emerge through the personal. The tension between what the children are capable of understanding and what the audience can recognize in the broader sociopolitical circumstances gives the film its grimmest charge, because that violence and inequality remain largely beneath the surface of Marnus’ perception; thus, their eventual impact lands with even greater force.