Nov 12 2026 - 4:15pm
Last month, Ben Shapiro announced a new front in the cinematic culture wars. “Netflix is bringing out a David Bowie-inspired, Led Zeppelin-scored glam rock version of CS Lewis’ Narnia, with a female-voiced Aslan,” he posted. “Emptying out core Western IP of all meaning and content… that’s what we’re fighting again. And with our new movie, Confession, we’re winning.”
Well, he’s certainly right about the contrast. Against the queer-coded maximalism of the Narnia trailer, Confession offers the polar opposite: a handful of rooms in a Soviet prison, barely any light, and enough solemnity to shatter a disco ball. It is straight, leaden, and dreary, with so much dialog about Russian literature that — sorry — you’re the one getting crime and punishment.
Confession debuted on Wednesday night on the Daily Wire’s streaming service and, for one evening only, in 100 cinemas, open exclusively to paying members of the company. It is the conservative media outfit’s bid to prove that the Right can make art instead of merely whining about it. The coup is the cast: Rob Lowe, James Franco, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Nolte. Real actors!
Shapiro penned the screenplay and claimed to have finished it in four days. This fact is presented as evidence of his prodigious abilities, but after viewing this film it accidentally sounds like a confession of its own. Having secured the actors and a prestigious director, Václav Marhoul, perhaps somebody should have secured a rewrite.
The story takes us to Moscow in 1938. Lowe plays Alexei, a former literature professor arrested and hauled into the Lubyanka prison. His interrogator turns out to be Vladimir (Franco), once his prize student and now a lieutenant of state security. Vladimir wants a signed confession denouncing a dissident priest. Alexei, who has made a recent conversion to Christianity, won’t give him one. For 132 minutes, they argue about God, Lenin, and Dostoevsky, with intermissions for beatings, philosophical chats with cellmates, and a visit from a bitter ex-wife.
It progresses like an expensive version of a one-act play about the horrors of Stalinism, staffed by familiar — and miscast — Gen-X and Boomer faces. Lowe, forever the sunny bureaucrat of Parks and Recreation, squints behind wire spectacles and speaks in a reedy voice that makes him sound much older than he actually is. Nobody attempts a Russian accent; one cast member admitted that he’d spent weeks and “a lot of money” perfecting one before his agent broke the news that no one else was bothering. And so when Franco, in his flat California cadence, bellows “Monsters change history!”, it is unintentionally hilarious.
There is a stirring message about forgiveness and redemption here; and to Shapiro’s credit, he gives his villain actual arguments. But it’s all buried in stilted, amateurish dialog. Franco’s Vladimir, a mouthpiece for the Stalinist Soviet state, is burdened with lines like “We have camps specializing in the trafficking in the opiate of the masses” — a nudge in the ribs for anyone who has heard of Karl Marx. And lest you don’t get the movie’s message that communism is bad, there is graffiti scrawled on the walls of a prison cell that is translated for the viewer as: Workers of the World, Shit!
The strange part is that Confession is competent-ish. It was shot on 35mm by Marhoul, the Czech director of The Painted Bird, and it apes prestige cinema just closely enough to land in the uncanny valley: the shadows, the grain and the Oscar nominees are all present, and all slightly off.
At one point in the Daily Wire’s live chat accompanying the screening, a viewer complained the movie was tedious, and Shapiro himself responded: “It turns out prison is… slow.” It’s never a good sign to compare your piece of streaming entertainment to an actual gulag. So while, yes, Netflix may well be emptying C.S. Lewis’s Narnia of meaning and content, Confession has the reverse problem: it is all meaning and content, and no movie.
