‘Confession’ Review: Rob Lowe, James Franco in Ben Shapiro-Penned Film

Reviewing the new movie scripted by Ben Shapiro, I’m tempted to pan it on ideological grounds. The screenwriter, after all, is the controversial right-wing political commentator who co-founded The Daily Wire and was editor-at-large at Breitbart News for several years. To say that the vast majority of his views are loathsome to me is an understatement.

Fortunately, it’s easy to write about the film directed by Václav Marhoul without being tainted by political bias. Depicting the brutal interrogation of a prisoner in a Stalin-era Russian jail, Confession proves a dull, turgid slog. The film will be given a one-night theatrical release on November 11, the same day it will be made available on The Daily Wire’s streaming service.

Other than its hardly controversial stance that Stalinist Russia was a very, very bad place, there’s nothing inherently political about the film. Except possibly for the casting of James Franco in a major role, which, like the presence of Jonathan Majors in the company’s recent Run Hide Fight: Infidels, seems designed to give a middle finger to the Hollywood studios for shunning them. In this case, Franco has plenty of distinguished company, with the ensemble including Rob Lowe, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Nolte, Emile Hirsch, Brad Dourif, Dean Norris, and Kodi Smit-McPhee. The story behind that casting would likely prove more interesting than the film itself.

Lowe plays the central role of Alexei, a former literature professor who is arrested in 1938 Moscow, brought to Lubyanka Prison and charged with being a counterrevolutionary. In the sort of coincidence beloved by unimaginative screenwriters, his interrogator is Vladimir (Franco), his former prize student. Vladimir presses his prisoner to inform on Father Mikulski (Dourif), a dissident Eastern Orthodox priest who has published an anti-Soviet pamphlet.

True to the participants’ former roles, the encounter becomes less an interrogation than a literary salon in which the names of Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy are dropped so often that a drinking game could be devised from it. The endless verbiage (the film runs a numbing 132 minutes) proves stultifying despite the efforts of the two actors, who give it their all but never manage to be remotely convincing in their roles.

The film essentially takes place in two settings: the interrogation room and the prison cell that Alexei shares with three others, making the claustrophobic proceedings feel very stagebound. Nolte plays a Jewish inmate, giving him the opportunity to deliver a harrowing monologue about atrocities he’s witnessed, which might have been powerful if the actor’s diminished gravelly voice didn’t reduce its impact. Hirsch plays a former concert pianist with an unnaturally cheerful attitude. Richard Brake (Barbarian), giving the film’s most effective performance, plays a hardened, cynical prisoner who coaches Alexei on how to survive.

Alexei’s bitter ex-wife (Leigh) visits him in his cell, exhorting him to inform on the priest. “Damn you and your literary references,” she shouts at Alexie when he resists in typically erudite terms, serving as a de facto proxy for viewers. Also showing up is his estranged son (an unrecognizable Smit-McPhee), angry with his father over the way his mother has been treated.

Then it’s back to the interrogation room, where Vladimir gets much rougher with Alexie, brutally beating him to force him to sign a confession. But his exertions don’t prevent him from having the energy to deliver such ham-fisted lines as “Evil and good are luxuries the revolution can no longer afford.”

Director Marhoul, whose controversial 2019 film The Painted Bird prompted numerous walkouts at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, infuses the film with a suitably gritty, intense tone, abetted by cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr.’s (Shooter, Gods of Egypt) strikingly harsh visuals.

Hopelessly stilted in its execution (it’s the kind of prison drama in which the guards and soldiers speak with all the realism of automatons), the terminally tedious Confession seems mainly designed to demonstrate that its screenwriter benefited from a really good education during which he studied all the Russian literary masters.