Confessional

I finished watching this film about 10 minutes ago on Shudder and if I'm honest it was quite disappointing. The basic plot is that after the deaths of two people, seven students are blackmailed in to a booth to confess something. It sounds pretty straight forward, but as the background for each character or the situation isn't properly explained it just ends up super confusing. Each of the seven then immediately embarks upon a rambling diatribe, most of which are hard to follow. Several of them go from 0-100 in one step, which doesn't leave them anywhere to go performance wise for the rest of the film.

If they had reduced the number of confessors down to maybe 4 or 5 and used the time saved to add some extra context, I think this could have been a reasonable film.

First rule of film school is don't make your movie about students at a film school. I gave it a 3 generous stars for the cool concept, sound, and set design, but the story is... well, another story. Really annoying characters who get too dramatic too fast. Everything felt contrived. The title cards in between scenes were unnecessary and read like they were written by child. Second rule of film school is show don't tell. If the filmmakers are reading this, please don't be discouraged. You had a cool concept, and I hope you can learn from this and apply it to your next movie.

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.

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.

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.