“We Already Know You’re Guilty. We Just Need You to Say So.”

Confession, directed by Václav Marhoul, screenplay by Ben Shapiro (Daily Wire, 132 minutes)

A totalitarian regime that can imprison you without evidence would seem to have little need for your confession. It can confiscate your property, starve you, torture you, and execute you. Why does it also need you to admit that you deserve it?

That question runs through Confession, a new Daily Wire film written by Ben Shapiro and directed by Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul. Set in Moscow in 1938, it follows Alexei (Rob Lowe), a literature professor sent to Lubyanka Prison. His interrogator, Vladimir (James Franco), once studied under him; Alexei describes him as his “most brilliant student.” Throughout the film, you see Vladimir attempting to persuade—and then coerce—his former professor into signing a confession: that he knew his priest had engaged in “counterrevolutionary activity.”

The result is a thoughtful, absorbing film that takes deep moral questions seriously. Marhoul, shooting on a 35mm camera, gives the film real texture; the grime of Lubyanka is palpable. As Alexei communicates with Vladimir and his fellow prisoners, their long exchanges and literary references give it the feel of a stage play. At its center is a troubling question: What does a regime gain when its victim agrees to call himself guilty?

Communist regimes’ obsession with extracting false confessions has always fascinated me. Red Guards in Maoist China described it as “exhaustive bombardment.” The interrogator will essentially say, in so many words, “Look, we already know you are guilty. We just need you to say so. And if you acknowledge your guilt, then this will all go much easier for you.” Eventually, the tortured individual just wants the pain to stop and acquiesces, believing that if he confesses to the imaginary crimes, he will be released or will at least receive better treatment. But once he has acknowledged his guilt, he is typically shipped to a labor camp, if not executed.

In Confession, the interrogator Vladimir treats the desired confession as a settled fact merely awaiting the professor’s agreement. An interrogation supposedly oriented toward truth-seeking begins by announcing what that truth must be.

Communist interrogation tactics anticipated a form of postmodern logic. The truth of guilt was often genuinely hard to establish. A regime could seldom prove beyond all doubt that a person was a spy or a saboteur or a “counterrevolutionary.” But once certainty is abandoned as a standard, evidence itself is dispensable. All that remains is the preferred narrative of whoever holds power. A confession becomes the only proof that matters, and extracting it is the interrogator’s duty. This is why Communist regimes pursued confessions even from the obviously innocent. The goal was not merely to establish guilt. It was to establish that truth was whatever the Party required it to be.

Watching the exchanges between the film’s characters, I kept thinking of Nien Cheng’s 1986 memoir, Life and Death in Shanghai. During China’s Cultural Revolution, Red Guards ransacked Cheng’s home. She spent more than six years in prison, where she was subjected to psychological manipulation and physical torture designed to make her confess to crimes she had not committed.

Regime officials already controlled every aspect of Cheng’s life. Yet they wanted her help in explaining why they were destroying it. An interrogator described to her the purpose of the jail where she was housed: “This is the Number One Detention House, a prison for political prisoners. This is the place where counterrevolutionaries who have committed crimes against the People’s Government are locked up and investigated.” The description assumes guilt prior to any interrogation.

Cheng detailed how the system was designed to manufacture its own supporting evidence: “While I was being pressured and urged to provide incriminating material against others, those others were at the same time being pressured and urged to provide incriminating material against me.” Each coerced accusation justified the next interrogation. This is partly why terror in such regimes grows geometrically: every confession manufactures evidence for the next wave of victims.

The Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin once recounted a chilling explanation of Stalin’s methods. To mold people according to his wishes, Stalin had to strip away the habits, rules, and expectations that gave their lives stability. Accused of crimes they never committed, or of breaking laws they could not understand, people lost any sense of how to protect themselves. Innocence offered no safety. Nor did obedience. Regardless of what you did or failed to do, punishment might still await. This made the accused person into a quivering and pliable mass of “jelly,” which the regime found easier to shape at will.

In Confession, Vladimir offers intellectual defenses of this arrangement. He describes to Alexei a material system in which ordinary ideas about good and evil become luxuries. Yet Vladimir also suggests that evil is required to defeat greater evils, such as exploitation and inequality.

This is among the film’s more useful observations. Most people, regardless of the brutality of their actions, still require moral claims to justify them. They believe that their cruelty serves a sufficiently worthy end. The prospect of a better world in the future supplies a reason to ignore the suffering of the flesh-and-blood individuals in front of them.

Vladimir makes threats against Alexei’s son. This, too, was an intriguing feature of the Soviet regime. The Soviets claimed to explain human action through material conditions—denying the role of biology and genetics—yet they treated guilt as something one could genetically inherit.

The film conveys one of its deepest ideas through a small, understated detail. Alexei notices a tiny insect crawling in a corner of the interrogation room. Here is something alive in the room that is unaffected by human ideology. Cheng found similar comfort watching a spider spin a web across her prison window. It reminded her of a world beyond the reach of her jailers. She writes, “It helped me to see that God was in control. Mao Tse-tung and his Revolutionaries seemed much less menacing. I felt a renewal of hope and confidence.”

A regime can control a person’s surroundings so completely that it appears to encompass all of reality. But faith, memory, literature, and even an insect can preserve the sense that something exists beyond its authority.

Confession is an absorbing film that trusts its audience to take serious ideas seriously. The film’s characters frequently quote Dostoevsky and other literary giants as they wrestle with questions about guilt, freedom, and the soul. These exchanges suit a struggle between a professor and his former student, whose shared education gives their conflict a particular depth. A few of the other conversations Alexei has with his cellmates would have benefited from greater restraint.

Still, the film’s willingness to give important ideas room to breathe is part of its appeal. For those interested in the history of Communism, Confession is a useful starting point for exploring works such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, and Cheng’s memoir.