How does a man follow Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s directive to “live not by lies” when a lie could save his life? Once he has soiled his soul with lies, can it ever be made clean? And the most difficult question of all, the one at the heart of Ben Shapiro’s extraordinary new film and screenwriting debut, Confession: In a world without God, why suffer for the truth if a lie can free you and your loved ones from tormentors too powerful to defeat physically?
These are Dostoyevskian questions, posed in a psychologically intense drama set inside Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1938, at the height of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror. Rob Lowe (of all actors!) plays Alexei Abramov, a drunk and dissolute literature professor dragged into Lubyanka for interrogation by the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. Though Fyodor Dostoyevsky died in 1881, we are in the world the great novelist foresaw with nightmare clarity, the one Solzhenitsyn faced down in the 20th century with so much courage, and that Confession conjures for the 21st, which needs the reminder. Adding to the complexity of Abramov’s brutal interrogation is the fact he knows his interrogator, Vladimir (played by James Franco with the eyes and delivery of a spitting cobra). Vladimir was once Alexei’s most brilliant student. Lowe, a Hollywood heartthrob of yore, whose battered, handsome face conveys the psychological and spiritual downfall of his character, finds himself under the boot—at times literally—of his former protégé, who found life as a Bolshevik secret policeman more fulfilling than the scholarly path.
The dramatic setup is simple: The secret police are trying to build a case against an Orthodox priest they suspect of committing the crime of evangelism. They know that Abramov is acquainted with the priest, Father Nikolai, hence his interrogation. The Soviet prison suggests a dark, hopeless, unremittingly grimy anteroom to hell—which is what the Lubyanka was in those days. The jailers toss the professor into a dank, tiny cell not much bigger than a coffin.
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