Daily Wire’s Confession, Written by Ben Shapiro, Streams With Rob Lowe, James Franco
The Daily Wire's Confession, the first feature written by Ben Shapiro, is streaming on the company's website. Rob Lowe, James Franco and Jennifer Jason Leigh star in a drama set inside Moscow's Lubyanka Prison in 1938, shot in a Los Angeles studio.
Confession, the Daily Wire's first feature film written by Ben Shapiro, is now streaming on the conservative media company's website, with Rob Lowe and James Franco in lead roles. The confession movie is set in 1938 and follows a professor taken to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow for interrogation by agents of the Stalinist state.
It is the latest feature from the Daily Wire and Shapiro, who is also a producer. Earlier this fall the company premiered Run Hide Fight: Infidels on the same streaming service. That film's only big name, Jonathan Majors, was absent from most of it, leaving a cast of unknown young actors.
Who is in the cast
Confession has a longer list of recognizable names. Lowe plays the professor, Alexei, a broken-down alcoholic with yellow teeth and a face full of spider veins. Franco plays his main interrogator, Vladimir, a former student of Alexei's who has become an instrument of state violence.
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Alexei's ex-wife, Anya. She is brought in to pressure him to betray a priest whom the state wants to imprison for distributing religious pamphlets. Brad Dourif plays the priest.
Nick Nolte plays an unnamed Jewish inmate, one of three men who share a cell with Alexei. Kodi Smit-McPhee, an Oscar nominee, plays Alexei's estranged son. Emile Hirsch plays a concert pianist whose fame has not kept him out of prison.
A single location
The production was wrapped in a few months and filmed in a studio in Los Angeles. Nearly the entire film takes place inside the prison, among blue-gray walls and bare light bulbs. There are no flashbacks and no scenes of a cafeteria or exercise yard.
Alexei is a man besieged by guilt. He took part in dekulakization in Ukraine, a campaign that aimed to "liquidate" wealthy peasant farmers. Between interrogations, his cellmates teach him about the crimes of the Stalinist regime, and the script uses those scenes to lecture on the violence of the Communist state.
One critic who has seen the film called it visually boring and darkly lit, but said it feels passably like a real movie. The same critic credited the professional actors with keeping it watchable, while saying the script cannot carry the weight placed on it.
Confession is available now on the Daily Wire's website.
