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Kathleen Murphy of "Film Comment" called McKellen and Renfro's performances "skin-crawling" but felt that it did not complete the film. Murphy wrote, "[The acting] makes you wish "Apt Pupil" had the art and the courage actually to look into evil's awful abyss." The critic perceived that "Apt Pupil" came off as a conventional horror film, that it had Stephen King's "characteristically unsavory" touches, and that Singer's "inept" direction "trivialize[s] the characters and the subject matter". Lisa Schwarzbaum of "Entertainment Weekly" saw "Apt Pupil" as not a "hunted-Nazi thriller" nor a "full-tilt Stephen King thriller", but as a "student-teacher parable" that comes off as "disturbing". Schwarzbaum felt that Singer told "a story with serious moral resonance", though patience was needed to get past Singer's "more baroque cinematic touches" of "visual furbelows ... and aural gimmicks" in the film, citing as examples Dussander watching Mr. Magoo on television or the musical piece "Liebestod" being blared during a bloody scene.