Screening at this year’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, writer/director Aaron Rottinghaus’ Apart tells the story of Noah and Emily, two high-school best friends who have become forever linked as the result of a horrific grade-school tragedy. However, this link proves to be more than just psychological, as in each others’ presence the two begin experiencing nightmarish hallucinations that seem to predict future tragedies. Based on the rare and controversial psychiatric disorder known as “folie a deux” (literally translated as “a madness shared by two”), the film veers back and forth in time between the friends’ high school years and their young adult lives, in which Noah, suffering from acute amnesia as the result of an unnamed accident in his senior year, has lost all recollection of Emily and only sets out to find her when he discovers a box of old photographs that have been mysteriously hidden by those around him. He soon realizes that reconnecting with Emily is the key to unlocking the unspoken high-school calamity that changed the course of their lives forever.

B-D’s Chris Eggertsen recently had the opportunity of screening the intriguing-sounding new film, and, while he appreciated freshman director Rottinghaus’ bold cinematic ambition, in the end he found the story lacking in one key area:

“The thing of it is, a director can be as narratively audacious as he or she wants, but at the end of the day the film still needs to be underpinned by some sort of visceral or cathartic pay-off for its audience. In that sense, `Apart’ stands as a classic case of a film that is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. For all of Rottinghaus’ visual dexterity, by the (hugely anti-climactic) final scene I couldn’t help but feel the sting of an empty promise, from a filmmaker admirably grasping for a Shakespearean level of profundity and sadly coming up short.”

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