Confession: The Movie


Last night my wife and I watched a new DVD from Blockbuster entitled Confession. Apparently it supposed to be similar to the Alfred Hitchcock thriller I Confess.

Basically there is a murder and the murderer himself confesses his crime to an innocent priest. But all the evidence eventually leads (wrongly) to the priest. Since the priest is bound under the seal of the confessional not to disclose any information provided in a sacramental confession, he has to bite the bullet.

I haven’t seen the Hitchcock version (the picture above is from it), but this version was pretty good. It was definitely a “B” level film but it did have a really cool ending.

**If you’re going to rent it, don’t read past here.**

At the end the murderer comes back to the confessional with his gun to his own head, ready to kill himself in sorrow. The priest sees that he is about to commit suicide and does the coolest thing. He punches his hand through the confessional screen and proclaims in an authoritarian voice, “Thou shalt not kill!” He takes the gun away as the police are coming and says, “They’re going to take you know. But you can’t go with this sin on your soul. You can now make a confession and leave with a pure soul.” The murderer does so.

The murderer eventually gets gunned down by the cops and the movie ends with an ad orientem Mass with the same falsely accused priest wearing a black fiddleback chasuble at the murderer’s Requiem. Pretty POD, if you ask me.

Anyway, it’s one of the few modern films that actually depicts priests in a good light.

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