Apprentice

a delicate theme. brilliant script. fine performances. and the most inspired manner to explore the guilt, the past, the friendship, the duty. in essence, a water drawing. touching, precise, admirable for the courage to not be prisoner of clichés. because it is one of the admirable exploration of subjects who, very easy, could be traps for many directors. and occasion of fascinating meet between Wan Hanafi Su and Firdaus Rahman.

If you love real movies where there is no bad and good when humans interact then you have to watch this film.

Treats the same theme of "el verdugo", for many the best Spanish film ever. The dilemmas of the executioner who struggles to convince himself that this is a job like every one else and someone has to do it. Needs guts to be a legal serial killer and sleep well during the nights without doubt.

Just see it and you will feel compassion, hate and frustration at the same time. When a movie makes you feel strong feelings, is a good movie.

Nothing else, a must watch.

Strong and straight forward drama in which a young prison guard is trained by an old chief to be the next 'hangman'. Both the young guard as the old chief have their inner demons and strong difficulties in coping with the job. Being a kind of legal killer is not like another day in the office. It leaves marks. This film describes in a non-sensational way that those who actually have to execute the death penalty, die also a little bit inside with each hanging the system 'asks' them to do.

I don't know how many films about hangmen, and only them, were made during movie history. I remind Jack Smight's TRAVELING EXECUTIONER back in 1970. But this feature from Singapore is a real hit in the face. It draws a portrait of those men, at least in this country where the capital punishment is hanging...It would be interesting to see how the hangmen in the USA proceed with the electric chair or the gas chamber... Anyway, you deal here with a powerful piece of work, accurate, astounding movie pulled by performances that I repeat hit you in the face. The struggle of a new prison guard who becomes the hangman's assistant, long time after his own father was himself executed by the same hangman. Those schemes about forgiveness, guilt or vengeance have already been told a billion times before, but this one, in this very feature, is absolutely unforeseeable. You can't expect what will eventually happen. Impossible. No clichés here. None of them. No bad guys or good ones. No cruel prison wardens or cold executioner scheme, on the contrary, everything is so human. So true. So real.

A real must see.

A Singaporean drama; A story about a Malay corrections officer who embarks on a challenging new career as apprentice to the prison hangman. This simple revenge story transforms into a film with a theme on rage, guilt and acceptance. The story is effectively told with drip-feed revelations and a mounting tension as the plot takes the character into successively grim scenarios. Thematically, it is simple, however, and the film stops short of broaching the subject of legal killings or the one pertaining to the character.