A decade and a half after its initial release, the psychological drama "Apart" is stepping back into the spotlight. The film, directed by Aaron Rottinghaus, is set against the unlikely pairing of Cyprus and apartheid-era South Africa, and it returns to the circuit with an exclusive trailer debut ahead of its screening at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. The pitch is pointed: the movie, per its makers, "challenges the idea of 'us' and 'them.'" For a thriller built on a rare psychological disorder, that framing is less a tagline than a thesis.
At its center is a bond between two young people, Noah Greene and Emily Gates, played by Josh Danziger and Olesya Rulin. Linked by the condition, they set out to untangle the mystery of a tragic past in the hope of finding something to hold onto in the future. The premise folds romance into suspense: two lives entangled by biology, driven to excavate a history neither fully understands, with the promise of hope hanging on what they uncover.
The supporting cast gives the film a sturdy adult spine around its young leads. Bruce McGill appears as Dr. Thomas Abner, with Joey Lauren Adams as Dr. Jane Sheppard - figures who presumably carry the clinical and investigative weight of the story. Michael Bowen plays Teddy Berg, while Sue Rock and David Born appear as Julie Gates and Joseph Greene, and Jason Davis rounds out the ensemble as Oliver Greene. The names suggest two families and a pair of doctors orbiting the central couple, a structure that fits a mystery about inheritance and diagnosis.
"Apart" runs 85 minutes, a tight runtime for a story juggling drama, thriller mechanics, mystery and romance. Rottinghaus keeps the film in English and within the Hollywood production pipeline. Its original release date was March 9, 2011, which makes this Tallinn outing a revival rather than a premiere - a second life for a small film whose subject matter has only grown more charged with time.
That subject matter is the film's real conversation piece. Cyprus and apartheid South Africa are not casual backdrops; both carry histories of partition, entrenched division and the drawing of hard lines between communities. Placing a story about a shared, rare disorder inside those settings gives the title a double meaning. The "apart" of the film is both medical and political: two people kept separate by a condition, and societies kept separate by ideology. The trailer's accompanying claim, that the film challenges the notion of "us" and "them," reads as an invitation to see the leads' connection as a rebuke to the categories built around them.
There is also the matter of the disorder itself, which the film treats as a mystery to be solved rather than a label to be explained. Noah and Emily are not merely patients; they are investigators of their own pasts, and the movie's tension comes from whether the truth they dig up will bind them closer or tear them apart. That is familiar ground for psychological thrillers, but the cross-continental setting and the apartheid backdrop give it a sharper edge than the genre norm.
What the new push does not include is any indication of a wider re-release or a fresh theatrical run beyond the festival slot. Nor does it come with revised critical standing. The film's TMDb rating sits at 4.3 out of 10, a middling score that suggests audiences have been divided on it since 2011. A festival trailer can reframe a movie, but it cannot rewrite a reception; viewers arriving in Tallinn will be meeting a work that has already been judged once.
Still, timing is everything in distribution, and the themes here - division, diagnosis, the fragile possibility of connection - are not dated in the way a 2011 release might suggest. The exclusive trailer gives "Apart" a fresh frame and a new audience, and the Tallinn platform offers it a room full of festivalgoers inclined to engage with a film that wears its ideas on its sleeve. Whether the movie lives up to the ambitions of its marketing is now, once again, an open question.
For now, the film stands as a compact, sharply cast curiosity: an English-language Hollywood production with an unusual geographic imagination, a pair of young leads tied together by affliction, and a director willing to ask what happens when the line between people dissolves. The trailer has done its job. The rest is up to the audience in Tallinn.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
