Confessional Review (Film, 2020)

content warning: death by suicide, drug use, misogyny, homophobia, violence against women (discussed), graphic violence (implied), mental wellness, flashing lights

I like to keep it real with you. Last Thursday, 4 June, I posted on Twitter about how I was struggling with a film.

I misfired on what I chose to write about for today's post and need more time to evaluate it. I might get that review up later today. I'm probably switching to something else. I don't want to skip posting today. I just need time.

— Robert (@robertjgannon) June 4, 2020

The film was Confessional and I’m still struggling with it. That content warning above? That’s largely the plot of the film. This film is meant to leave you feeling angry about injustice in the world. It’s also an unrated horror film that has no content warning or parental advisory on it. The provided plot description is intentionally vague to avoid spoiling anything.

I take content warnings seriously. Content warnings exist to give you the chance to prepare yourself for what you are going to watch. They are not meant to coddle you or censor art. They are there so people who might have an adverse reaction to certain subjects or visuals can make the choice of how to proceed. My response to a content warning is research. I’ll read the plot description. I’ll reach out to people I know who’ve seen the film and ask questions. I’ll look into interviews, trailers, video features—whatever I can get my hands on so I have a better sense of what is to come. I’ll wait long enough for a nice Wikipedia-sized plot synopsis to be available so I can make an informed decision to watch if I’m really concerned.

Right away Confessional fails at giving anyone that option. The official plot description starts, “After two mysterious deaths at a college on the same night.” We’ve already been misled. There is mystery behind the deaths, but they are proclaimed as death by suicide in the opening title cards. It does nothing to spoil the twists and turns of the film to adjust that plot summary to start, “After the surprising death by suicide of two students on the same night.” If you’re going to lie by omission, you’re already putting me in a bad mood.

This is not even what I struggled with in the film. Confessional, by concept, has no subtlety. Seven students are invited to tell their secrets in the wake of the campus deaths. They enter a padded room with cameras poking out of the walls to capture everything they say. They cannot leave until they reveal their deepest secret and will be punished if they get caught lying. It’s also presented as a true story, a mysterious film left behind at a college campus that no one can trace the origin of.

I’m 100% behind the conceit of this film. The simple set and monologue-driven story gave me all the theatrical horror qualities I crave. It’s a huge risk to take onscreen as there’s no hiding bad acting. The nine person cast (the seven participating students and other video footage of the two students who died) is hit or miss. None are bad actors, but you can see some of them struggle to find nuance in their character arcs or adapt to the confined set.

The VIP is Annalisa Cochrane as Raquel, the campus drug dealer. She has a character type we’ve seen a lot in horror. She’s the bad girl. If this was a slasher, she’d be that death leading into the third act when the body count starts to stack up. Cochrane is at ease in the various close-ups required of the role. She’s the most natural in the clearly choreographed movements to stare into a specific camera to break up the static shot.

The use of the multiple cameras is a bit too on the nose. The purpose of using that many cameras in a real world setting is to capture multiple angles at the same time. I’m sure some of the cameras in the set are just props, but we do get a few different angles during the film. Director Brad T. Gottfred has the actors always face the camera he wants to use. In a bottle film with essentially one set, you want to find ways to change the perspective for visual interest. I think it would have been more interesting if some of these shots were a profile or overhead view of the actors still performing their monologues to the camera right in front of them. The actors struggle with it, too, coming across like vloggers with a multiple camera setup breaking the 4th wall rather than characters believably shifting focus as they tell their stories. Hitting everything with a closeup on the face starts to feel a bit too aggressive.

The aggression doesn’t end there. Jennifer Bosworth’s screenplay is not subtle. You spend a minute with one of the characters and have a pretty good idea of what their deep dark secret is. There are twists you won’t guess because they have no basis in anything that actually impacts the original story (and are there purely for shock value), but I pegged each person’s role in the life and death of the two dead students in the first five minutes of the film. Their attitude, their carriage, their mental state do not change throughout the course of the film. They are emotionally and psychologically static, slowly circling the drain until they flush out their secret.

That is why I struggled with Confessional so much. When you can look at a character and know exactly why they’re struggling, it’s hard. It gets even harder when they’re clearly ready to talk about it but are monologuing about how much they hate the world and are suffering because of what happened to them. The story cuts between the seven sets of confessions for dramatic effect, which just traps you longer in some very unsettling territory.

I don’t need to watch a college student dissociate onscreen for 12 minutes of an 83 minute film just because you need to stall the truth long enough to match your overly complicated resolution to the narrative. It’s the same way I don’t need nine minutes of a genuinely awful character just being awful because it serves the plot or probably a collected 30 minutes of characters describing how they used to date one of the two students who killed themselves. This is only topped by the 15 minutes of characters monologuing about how they know WHO is doing this to them and will now speak directly to them, but without acknowledging who that person is even after the film (very quickly) peels back the curtain. The parallel narratives all start to sound the same because they mostly have the exact same beats.

Confessional is a film. it has good points and bad points. I had a horrible experience watching it. It hit on a bunch of subjects that I do my research on if I receive any warning at all about what I’m going to see. If I know a film hits the abc’s of content that can impact my mental and physical well-being, I’ll wait until I can read a full plot synopsis before choosing to watch. It’s that contentious by design. If there’s no warning, no advisory, and an intentionally vague plot description that hides any reference to potentially upsetting content, I don’t get the choice to be an informed viewer. I NEVER want to put anyone else in that situation. Confessional should be the equivalent of Patti Labelle singing the alphabet of should-be content warnings. Watch it at your own risk.

Confession is currently streaming on Shudder.

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