Carefully hidden below the surface, a morbid fascination gnaws at all of us, and nothing piques that forbidden curiosity more than stories relating to the Holocaust. Something about recent history's most repellent period attracts us like nothing else.

If our curiosity for the atrocious serves to draw us into a masterpiece like Schindler's List—or any film that leaves us with an important lasting message—then we have benefited by it. On the other hand, when a film reaches out to our perverse desire to understand such horrors for the sake of entertainment, we find ourselves attracted to exploitation at its worst.

And that is the unforgivable transgression behind Apt Pupil, a garbled and tasteless thriller about high-school student Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), who discovers ex-SS officer Kurt Dussander (Sir Ian McKellen) living under a new identity in his New England hometown. Rather than turning the Nazi war criminal over to the authorities, Bowden blackmails him into telling his story, focusing on the macabre details that only someone closely involved with the actual events could know.

"I want to hear about it," Bowden demands. "Everything they're afraid to show us in school." For Bowden, Dussander becomes the link to "everything you wanted to know about the Holocaust but were afraid to ask." The film seems to understand our inexplicable fascination with the topic, but this is definitely not the way we want to encounter such material.

From Usual Suspects director Bryan Singer, we might expect Apt Pupil to be a slick adaptation of the Stephen King novella from which it comes. After all, Singer has proven himself capable of creating complex, turbulent characters in the past. To raise expectations further, Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, both from King's Different Seasons collection, worked as intelligent dramas on film.

Unfortunately, Apt Pupil shatters its potential entirely, leaving us with a vapid, meandering film with no clear plot or theme. For King, who avoided his usual mix of supernatural horror in his Different Seasons tales, a Nazi officer embodies one of the few types of "monsters" to really exist. In a way, Dussander embodies the quintessential characterization of evil, transcending even our worst imaginings.

In Singer's hands, the Nazi overtones merely provide a weak excuse for such over-the-top scenes as Bowden forcing Dussander to goosestep in uniform and the scandalous shower sequence in which Bowden imagines himself transported into a gas chamber.

Presented as a film, Apt Pupil takes on an ironic second level, since the viewer, like Bowden, hungers for details. Can Dussander tell us what it was like to watch someone gassed to death? What did it feel like? Singer spares us most of the specifics, though he includes enough material in such an offensively blasé manner that we quickly realize he isn't trying to put us in Bowden's place. Apt Pupil's lesson, if there is one to be found, comes across as a warning about where our curiosity can lead.

Finding out about the Holocaust brings out an aspect of Todd Bowden's personality that most people keep so deeply repressed, they never realize that it exists. As Bowden contemplates killing a helpless pigeon, we realize that we're watching a serial killer in the making (which is his ultimate fate in King's story, though the film takes a different approach). This is a film that starts off beyond redemption and spirals downward from there. Bowden's involvement with Dussander, who had put his past behind him only to have it dredged up to control his life again, can lead in only one direction, and it's a path that isn't worth taking.

Despite the horror implicit in the story, Singer conveys the transformations with such ineptitude that we never see below the exterior of his characters. McKellen, a brilliant choice for the role of an austere German despite his British nationality, never has the chance to express the inner conflict that comes with his regression to a previous state of inhumanity. Singer abandons such development in favor of a symbol more terrifying for its bad taste than its actual action: Dussander demonically thrusts a cat into his kitchen oven, as though "for the old time's sake."

Renfro does little with his part, moving blank-faced and mechanically through the throes of Bowden's moral deterioration. To Renfro's credit, we see the spark of his shortening temper as it gleams behind his piercing eyes, and his bursts of anger erupt with frightening spontaneity. But we are left not knowing how to handle this unsympathetic main character, since Renfro fails to show us the type of person he was before meeting Dussander, thus leaving us incapable of understanding the effect this new force has on him. To what degree does Bowden's discovery destroy his innocence, and how much of his resulting character had been hidden all along?

The film suffers most heavily not necessarily from its troubling topic, but from Bryan Singer's sloppy direction. The disorganized jumble of information with which he presented us in The Usual Suspects worked to that film's advantage, further obscuring the surprise lurking at the end of the film. In Apt Pupil, and to a lesser extent in his earlier film Public Access, Singer employs the same garbled style of storytelling without giving us a satisfying conclusion to show that his obscurity was called for.

Singer has yet to develop a strong narrative style. He frequently gets caught up in tangential subplots and frenzied cross-cutting between unrelated scenes. Singer piles on the distractions in an effort to hide the film's frailty, adding such misused elements as Bowden manipulating his naïve guidance counselor (played by David Schwimmer) à la Wild Things. Though such details could reveal the insight into Bowden's character the audience needs, Singer seems to ignore the way everything should come together in favor of playing each scene to its greatest effect.

Apt Pupil consistently fails to justify its abuse of a sensitive topic, reminding us why censors came to be in the first place. When we consider recent cases in which valuable films have been challenged merely for dealing with controversial subject matter (Happiness, Lolita, etc.), it's a wonder than no one objected to Apt Pupil on the grounds of its tactless stupidity. Singer and King both seem to understand young America's need to deal with its curiosity about the Holocaust, but they choose to exploit rather than respond to that unsettling desire.