Tag Archives: Catholicism

One of the most unexpectedly heart-wrenching and twisted, yet captivating, depictions of a young boy’s loss of innocence is found in this year’s Oscar-nominated short film, The Confession.

Directed and written by Tanel Toom, the British psychological thriller presents the story of two 9-year-old boys, Sam and Jacob, who are worried about their first Catholic confession. However, what is seemingly a harmless, playful story about two boys wondering what to confess and playing a prank on a tractor driver takes a deadly turn for the worse.

This is not Toom’s first plunge into films with religious and spiritual themes.  In 2008, he released his short film, Second Coming, in which a a soldier does not bury his brother who is killed in war, hoping for his resurrection.

Following in the path of other tragic coming-of-age films like 1986’s Stand By Me and other “bad child leading the good child astray” films like 1993’s The Good Son, The Confession does what the other oscar-nominated short films do not: no answers, no relief, no closure. It leaves the audience with an eerie feeling, a yearning for more.

Toom develops the plot not only through the compelling actors and dialogue, but also through the use of symbolism and the cinematography. His juxtaposition of the cornfield, the scarecrow on the cross, and the tractor driver with the church symbols gives the film a thought-provoking depth.

Does the scarecrow represent Jesus and the Crucifixion, and the tractor driver, God? The scarecrow is buried (in order to hide the evidence) with no ressurection, suggesting only death and no hope. Both the scarecrow and the tractor driver provide the turning point of the film. Before the scene of the car crash, his tractor turns instead of driving straight into the scarecrow on the road, sealing the fate of the family in the car.

The cinematography also worked to capture the mood of the film and the main characters. From the start, the visuals evolved, from colorful and bright to gray-scale and dark. The film turns from light-hearted to heavy and melancholic, and the cinematography illustrates the psychological weight of the deaths on Sam.

The Confession questions how faith and religion leads people to do certain things, how a complex religion and its practices through the eyes of a young person or someone who do not understand it fully can be dangerous, and how religious pressure affects an individual. Humans and nature are often in conflict with religion and its practices.

“You have to tell the priest everything or he won’t be ale to absolve you; he won’t be able to forgive you. And God knows when you are hiding something.” warns the priest to class in the beginning of the film.

That is a lot of pressure in of itself; now imagine that amount of pressure in the mind of a 9-year-old, which culminated into the ending of the film. How does Sam find the words to say he was involved in the death of a family and his friend; instead he opts to confess the normal childhood expectation that kids do not listen to their parents and tease their siblings. If only the actual truth was that simple.