Bad Idea, Good Movie

Playing it cool, after an unspeakable wrong, can snow in one’s youthful innocence, changing their existence from games to life. Now, what in the devil’s basement does that mean? Up-and-coming, European director Tanel Toom exhibits its meaning in just his 10th short film, “The Confession,” a dramatic, short film dealing with an adolescent boy’s anxiety about his first confession, which intensifies the closer he gets to it.

Jacob

Sam, played by Lewis Howlett, is a slender but not scrawny 9-year-old boy with a conservative, short haircut and hushed personality that makes him a character that one starts to sideline in the beginning of the film but then is the sole character one can recall, on the spot, by the end of the motion picture. Contrary to Sam is his close friend Jacob, played by Joe Eales; the long-haired, well-upholstered classmate’s brusque speech helps make Sam forgettable at first while his idea that was in need of sensible consideration reversed that. Even so, the film’s thrill is resolute, thanks to how it was shot and the script.

The idea is to do a wrong that Sam could confess to since he did not have one; Jacob conjures taking one of Sam’s father’s scarecrows and place them in the middle of an isolated road to cause a tractor accident. For me, that echoed the 1993 movie “The Good Son,” in which two other adolescent boys carry out the same idea, but, unlike Toom’s film, one of them converts the idea to a plan while being aware in all respects about the disastrous aftermath.

“The Confession” did win the 2010 Student Academy Awards® Honorary Foreign Film Award and is a current nominee for an Academy Award in the Short Film (Live Action) category, but, at length, it is not expected to be a titanic box-office hit, filling up multiplexes across the board. But then again, what short film is?  That being the case, the film should not be discredited but valued for its equivocal compassion to evoke self-imposed questions about one’s stance on adulthood, religion, strength and truth.

The film has two action-packed, gripping, hair-raising, mind-blowing, riveting, spine tingling or whatever other predictable and repetitive adjective you enjoy hearing over and over again scenes. Believe me? Go watch it. Don’t? Order Avatar for the ninth time on the Blockbuster-killer Netflix and say the words the blue people say before they say it since you think it is hilarious to speak like them, even though you annoy everybody else in the room because the one time they thought it was funny was the first time you did it and even then it was not that funny. Yeah, do that. It is not like seeing “The Confession” is going to take far less time, be more enthralling and cost less than a Chia Obama.