Confessional

Confessional

Yet another movie premise squandered away on a silly plot, bad acting and a twist you can see coming from a mile away. This one rehashed dull threads of movies past with a cast of fresh "pretty people" all somehow connected to the deaths of two people on campus. Complete with God awful camera angles that don't match the scene, with each actor turning to face each camera as they switch between shots. Nothing more than a lazy revenge mystery that doesn't even qualify as "mystery" as it is blatantly obvious within the first 20 minutes who is behind it all. Hard pass.

These reviews are a little harsh. The film definitely doesn't belong on Shudder, and is far from any conception of "good", but it's not completely worthless. I thought it was kind of cute, as a film student or novice filmmaker's attempt at a kind-of found footage or mockumentary style thriller. It has some moments (the...er... "gloryhole" scene comes to mind), and I liked their clever set design and use of lighting effects to make the booth come alive around the actors. Music was pretty decent too. It suffers from a profound lack of direction (there's no real substance to the plot), but the writing's actually not half bad. My biggest gripe with the film, aside from how the story kinda falls apart as more "confessions" are revealed, is actually the premise itself. I think the creators wanted an interesting vehicle to deliver their story of love/obsession/betrayal and kind of just rolled with the confessional video idea, but forgot to ground it in reality. Yeah, the story revolves around a student who shot confessional videos herself, but in what universe would six people all separately agree to meet someone they don't know in an empty building to talk about someone who just died under mysterious circumstances? Aside from the drug dealer, none of the characters have any real "dirt" on them that can be used as blackmail. No way ALL of them put their *lives at risk* out of fear of their classmates learning all the sordid details of their personal lives. Overall it's an entertaining little film though. I thought the performances were passable (the "villain" stands out) and the premise is original enough to keep you engaged, despite being completely unbelievable.

So I actually rated this piece of crap. Seriously what's happening to Hollywood why is literally every recent project garbage?

The cast is basically young working actors that I'm guessing was helping out a friend with major Hollywood connections. This claustrophobic low budget film school project was Poorly written with bad directional timing!

You guys I dont understand why there is so much hate on this movie. I mean i understand its not the best I/you have ever seen but the plot is in my opinion really awesome. There are good plot twists, fun and good actors. They did get too dramatic too fast though. If you really wanna watch thriller though dont choose this movie. The trailer is kinda misleading.

After reading the reviews I felt like I needed to leave a review. I didn't hate this movie. It's not as bad as all the reviews say it is. I'll even say I enjoyed it. Lots of twists, which I like in a movie. I don't understand all the hate.

Not sure why this was a Shudder Exclusive because there is no horror in the film whatsoever. It's not a thriller. It's a pile of garbage. I've watched almost every horror film that the above average horror fan can watch in my 30 years, and this is not only the worst horror film I've seen, it's the worst film. I've been reading reviews on films for about 8 years now on IMDB to see what people say before I watch it. Wish I had done that for this one. Heed the reviews or you too will lose 86 boring minutes of your life.

First, lets get right to it: the ENTIRE movie takes place in a confession booth. Remember that movie Phone Booth? Now, imagine that the only camera was inside the booth and you never saw the outside world. Doesn't that sound like an awesome movie? No??? Well the creators of this apparently though it would be a good idea. While movies like Unfriended: Dark Web and the V/H/S series experiment with new ways to make the Found Footage style dynamic and interesting, Confessional goes for the opposite approach- removing any and all potential the medium has and delivering one of the absolute most barebones "films" in history. I'm extremely hesitant to even call this a film when it fact it's more like simply "Dialogue: The Movie". Anyhow, since they didn't spend any money on the production of this movie hopefully they spent it on the story? Nope. This comes across as a 13-16yr olds revenge fantasy wet dream. The movie revolves around the character of Amelia who is apparently one small step away from Jesus- all the characters seem to idolize her to the level of a bad fanfic. Everyone loves her the most and is mad at so & so for falling short of loving her enough, or...something. The narrator is forcing everyone to confess and this narrator feels like a blatant and highly self-congratulatory self-insert. The characters are all cardboard cutout level 1-D (macho jock guy, a55hole alt right guy, crazy loner girl, guys roommate, someone's girlfriend, someone else's girlfriend) and act in completely unrealistic ways. They all let someone they didn't know all that well tape their "biggest regret"? Two people meet up and within seconds have sex in the booth? A guy has no reservations about getting sxcked off through a glory hole in the booth? Yes, totally believable things people would do, especially when being in a room watched/filmed by an unknown person! Unsurprisingly, the overall story is pretty straight-forward, generic teen/college drama. Everyone's "confession" is easily guessable within the first few minutes of them talking. Someone is gay, someone is cheating, someone was raped at a party...cornerstones of teen drama and absolutely no curveballs. They even go a step further and make it offensively dumb with the addition of 1 dimensional, heavy-handed, cartoonish "woke" stuff. The problem is that when you include very base-level woke stuff in a movie this bad/stupid, it makes people equate progressive ideas with a stupid ass movie of caricatures shoving their "woke" ideas upon the viewer and therefore not take them seriously. It would be much more effective if the movie was compelling and intelligently brought up progressive ideas in a way that accurately conveyed their seriousness. Additionally, this movie commits the cardinal sin of believing that "convoluted" is synonymous with deep/complex/unpredictable/smart. The movie continually cuts back and forth between the characters, giving them just enough time to talk without saying anything and then cutting away right when they might divulge some plot progressing information. This is done to artificially extend the rather shallow story and give the impression that the confession is going to be much more shocking than it actually is. It takes forever to get anywhere and you'll be constantly bored considering there is no actual visual stimuli- thereby forcing the movie to foolishly rely solely on its obtuse, overly confusing dialogue and storytelling. If you're going to reduce a movie to only the writing, than the writing needs to be exceptionally strong! Anyway, that's more than enough about this one. Terrible idea for a movie style; really low level, predictable writing; 1 dimensional, uninteresting characters; trite twist and complete lack of payoff. If I hadn't already cancelled my Shudder account than I would have after seeing this.

Since signing up to Shudder two months ago,I've been wanting to catch a original/exclusive on the first day,but due to various offline things have ended up watching at weekends. Unexpectedly getting extra free time,I went for a confession. View on the film: Seating all the subjects in neon lit booths, director Brad T. Gottfred & cinematographer Tobias Deml record a dry monotone atmosphere, keeping to the same mid-shot, giving each booth a repetitive appearance, draining any chance of tension arising. Attempting to move the Found Footage genre from Horror to Drama, the screenplay by Jennifer Wolfe attempts to record shocking twists in the booths, which fizzle out quickly, due to Wolfe making each person in the booths utterly interchangeable,and the lack of background given to either the people in the booths,or the two dead teens,causing the confessions made to ring hollow.