John Trengove is back in South Africa, and back in form. After the muted reception to his 2023 feature Manodrome, the Johannesburg-born director has adapted Mark Behr's 1993 novel The Smell of Apples, a book that's been a set text in South African schools for decades and, by most accounts, a tricky one to bring to screen.

The film sticks close to its source's premise. Eleven-year-old Marnus Erasmus, son of the country's youngest army general, spends five days in the run-up to his December school holidays slowly waking up to what his family's comfort actually costs. Dawian van der Westhuizen plays Marnus, and according to Variety's review, he's the real find here, small and fair and already sensing he's a disappointment to a father who treats his son's more strapping best friend like a second, sturdier boy.

Hilton Pelser plays that father, General Johan Erasmus, a man Variety describes as bluff and good-humoured until the anxiety underneath gets the better of him. Maude Sandham plays his wife Leonor, keeping up appearances her husband demands even as her exiled liberal sister keeps puncturing them from outside the house. There's a Chilean general staying as a houseguest too, fresh off the Pinochet coup, and whatever business he and Johan are conducting stays deliberately out of Marnus's reach and mostly out of the audience's.

A household built on someone else's labour

The film's sharpest instrument, per Variety's review, is Doreen, the family's live-in Black maid, played by Celeste Matthews Wannenburgh. She calls Marnus kleinbaas, little boss, with what the review calls weary affection and no irony, and the family would tell you she's practically one of their own right up until her orphaned grandson turns up needing a place to stay and the man of the house makes clear he isn't wanted.

Trengove and co-writer Christopher Ciancimino have apparently cut a lot of the novel's structure, including its flash-forwards to Marnus's adult military service. What's left, Variety suggests, is tighter and more contained, forcing the sense of where South Africa is headed to sit under the surface rather than being spelled out. The review also notes a departure from the book on the queer material that ran through Trengove's earlier work, The Wound and Manodrome, here reduced to suggestion rather than text.

No India or wider distribution date has been reported yet. The Smell of Apples joins a small run of recent films, alongside Moffie and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, that look at apartheid from inside the white household rather than from its victims, a choice the Variety review calls uncomfortable but deliberate. Whether that framing travels well beyond festival audiences is the question a wider release will have to answer.