I went to watch The Apprentice yesterday evening, up at The Barbican with John. We had both been wanting to watch it for weeks, but now that I have, I’m not sure how to sum up my thoughts on it. The film would be absolutely hilarious if it wasn’t so gut-churningly hideous. By that I mean, on one level, Donald Trump is a fundamentally comic character: the guy’s a moron with an over-inflated ego and no idea how the real world works. Yet on another level, Trump is an absolute disgrace to human civilisation who does not give a rat’s ass about the suffering he causes as long as he gets his own way. In the film, we see him raping women and doing all kinds of monsterous, hideous things. Such people drag humanity back into the cess-pit we should have escaped from long ago, and I’m glad Ali Abbasi’s film has been released in time to expose Trump as the monster he really is.

Only it wasn’t Trump – not quite, anyway. It was an actor, Sebastian Stan, playing Trump, and I thought Stan gave Trump an element of depth and sophistication he doesn’t really have. Like any good actor should, Stan explored his character, trying to find what motivated him; he represented Trump as a three-dimensional person, when in reality it is clear that Trump has only one – his ego. Thus I thought the film didn’t quite sit with the reality we are currently seeing unfolding in America, or the one-dimensional arsehole we see shouting bullshit from political rally stages. As far as cinematic monsters go, Trump must rank alongside the most depraved; it’s just a shame that even that monster cannot quite find the depths to which reality has now plummeted.

You can watch Mark Kermode’s much more fulsome review of The Apprentice here.