Ali Abbasi is good at making us watch people we might prefer to avoid. We value his curiosity, but The Apprentice shows the limit: once he has explained how someone changes, he can struggle to find anything more to say.
Fi1m perspective
In The Apprentice (2024), Roy Cohn takes a soft, needy young Donald Trump and starts to remake him. Abbasi gives that education enough time to become properly gripping, because we can see why the pupil wants to learn. Jeremy Strong’s performance is the main reason to stay with it. The attraction here is watching behaviour being learnt, and for an hour Abbasi finds something worth examining in a familiar subject.
His first feature was the slow-burn Danish horror Shelley (2016), followed by his breakthrough, Border (2018), with its troll mythology. Horror and fantasy gave him ways to approach outsiders without making them easy to understand. Composer Martin Dirkov has worked with him on four films, providing some continuity across a career that moves between countries, languages and genres.
With Holy Spider (2022), that interest took the form of a story drawn from real Iranian serial killings. We were frightened because Abbasi stayed with the killer long enough for him to seem ordinary. He did not let us dismiss the man and stop looking.
For television, he directed the final two episodes of the first series of The Last of Us (2023). We found the series moving because Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey made us care about the people in its ruined America. The scripts sometimes leave supporting characters short of time, but the patience of its horror-drama suits Abbasi’s interests. That achievement belongs to the series as a whole; there is no need to claim it all for him.
Back in The Apprentice, Gabriel Sherman’s script gives Abbasi a problem he does not solve. Once Cohn’s lessons have been learnt, the film moves through familiar events without finding much more to say about Trump. Worse, Abbasi cuts away at the moments when staying close might have told us something new. Try The Apprentice for Strong and the first hour, rather than for any fresh understanding of its central figure.
Biography
Ali Abbasi is an Iranian-Swedish-Danish film director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Tehran in 1981, he attended Tehran Polytechnic until 2002 before emigrating to Sweden to study architecture at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, graduating in 2007. He then trained at the National Film School of Denmark, graduating in 2011.
His feature films include Shelley (2016), Border (2018), Holy Spider (2022) and The Apprentice (2024), on which he also served as producer. He directed the final two episodes of the first season of the television series The Last of Us (2023). His work has received awards including the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
