“Confession” review: Rob Lowe and James Franco in the film written by Ben Shapiro

Watching the new film scripted by Ben Shapiro, I am tempted to criticize it on ideological grounds. The screenwriter, after all, is the controversial right-wing political commentator who co-founded The daily feed and was editor-in-chief at Breitbart News for several years. To say that the vast majority of his opinions are repugnant 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 prison, Confession turns out to be boring and turgid work. The film will be released in theaters for one evening on November 11, the same day of its release on The daily feedThe streaming service of.

Aside from its uncontroversial stance that Stalinist Russia was a very, very bad place, there is nothing inherently political about the film. Except perhaps the casting of James Franco in a major role which, like the presence of Jonathan Majors in the company’s recent film, Run Hide Combat: Unbelieversseems intended to give the middle finger to Hollywood studios that shun 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 this casting would probably prove more interesting than the film itself.

Lowe plays the central role of Alexei, a former literature professor arrested in 1938 in Moscow, incarcerated in Lubyanka Prison and accused of being a counter-revolutionary. In the kind of coincidence dear to unimaginative screenwriters, his interrogator is Vladimir (Franco), his former student. Vladimir urges his prisoner to denounce Father Mikulski (Dourif), a dissident Eastern Orthodox priest who published an anti-Soviet pamphlet.

True to the participants’ previous roles, the meeting becomes less an interrogation than a literary salon in which the names of Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Tolstoy are mentioned so often that it could be a drinking game. The endless verbiage (the film lasts 132 mind-numbing minutes) proves mind-numbing despite the efforts of the two actors, who give their all but never manage to be the least bit convincing in their roles.

The film essentially takes place in two settings: the interrogation room and the prison cell that Alexei shares with three other people, which makes the claustrophobic proceedings very staged. Nolte plays a Jewish inmate, giving him the opportunity to deliver a heartbreaking monologue about the atrocities he witnessed that could have been powerful if the actor’s deep, diminished voice hadn’t lessened its impact. Hirsch plays a former concert pianist with an unusually cheerful attitude. Richard Frein (Barbarous), who delivers the film’s most effective performance, plays a hardened and cynical prisoner who teaches Alexei how to survive.

Alexei’s bitter ex-wife (Leigh) visits him in his cell, urging him to report the priest. “To hell with you and your literary references,” she shouts at Alexie when he resists in typically erudite terms, serving as a de facto proxy for viewers. His estranged son (an unrecognizable Smit-McPhee) also appears, angry with his father because of the way his mother was treated.

Then back to the interrogation room, where Vladimir is much harsher with Alexie, brutally beating him to force him to sign a confession. But his efforts do not prevent him from having the energy necessary to pronounce sentences as muscular as “Evil and good are a luxury that the revolution can no longer afford.”

Director Marhoul, whose controversial 2019 film The painted bird caused numerous walkouts at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, infusing the film with a suitably gritty and intense tone, encouraged by cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr. (Shooter, Gods of Egypt) surprisingly harsh visuals.

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