Daily Wire’s “Confession” a Triumph for the Counterculture

Art is dead. Long live art.

“You must believe in something greater than the party.”

In our world now it’s called “hitting rock bottom.” You overcome your addiction or your addiction takes your life. For many, they are only saved when they give themselves over to a higher power.

In 1938 Moscow, Alexei—a disillusioned former literature professor—is one such man. He was once brought to faith by a dissident priest; now he himself is under suspicion for treason for disseminating religious materials.

Alexei’s interrogator, Vladimir, is his once-promising former student. Vladimir met Alexei at a crucial crossroads in his own life. He had two paths before him: defer his military service and continue to study, or abandon it. The choice Alexei made then will haunt him until the final frames of the magnificent new film Confession, released by the Daily Wire.

Confession came as a bit of a surprise. They managed to keep it a secret for many months. When it was announced, much of Hollywood clutched its pearls. These were prominent actors. This was a well-known director and the screenwriter is Ben Shapiro? THAT Ben Shapiro?

But Confession is good. It’s really good. It’s a leap forward for the Daily Wire, which had already been releasing films for the past few years, offering an alternative to Hollywood’s ideological monopoly. Like Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist?, not to mention the Run, Hide, Fight films. But none of them have reached as high or delivered as much as Confession, which is one of the best films of the year.

Directed by Václav Marhoul, Confession puts The Daily Wire on the map as a legitimate, formidable studio that can draw major talent like Rob Lowe, James Franco, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, all delivering astonishing award-worthy performances. All would be up for the Oscars if we didn’t live in the same kind of culture that blacklists anyone not on board with the Left’s worldview.

True, no one will be locked away in a Siberian gulag for the crime of dissent. There won’t be millions driven to cannibalism and starvation, sacrificing their own babies, as there were back then. We aren’t living in 1984 by military force. But the mechanisms are the same, because there is nothing new under the sun.

When I watched Confession it reminded me of the necessity of freedom—of thought and, yes, of religion. What so threatened the NKVD is the idea that another message might be offered to the people other than Communism.

Unfortunately for us, Americans were not taught the horrors of Stalin’s Russia. They barely know what happened in World War II at all. They’ve forgotten what Hitler did, and many of those on the Right now crowing about Iran would have done the same thing back then to keep America out of the war.

Great art can transcend the wickedness of modern times, which is why Confession is such an important movie right now. That’s why screenwriter Shapiro has layered his screenplay with references to Dostoevsky and classical composers like Beethoven and Mozart, and why we find ourselves thinking about 1984 and the Bible itself while watching it.

Just as The Twilight Zone kicked off the counterculture by offering subversive storytelling amid mandated conformity ruled through fear and blacklists, so too does The Daily Wire now represent the beginning of what I hope will be a thriving counterculture.

Everything has reversed itself. They feared Communism in the 1950s. Now they fear traditionalism. They fear heterosexuality and the nuclear family. They fear pregnancy and babies. They fear church and Christianity most of all. It should not be lost on anyone that the Left has made Christians their most prominent target, just as Stalin did back in 1938.

Christianity used to be mainstream in Hollywood, from It’s a Wonderful Life to The Twilight Zone. It took a while for it to become strictly forbidden, existing only in the genre ghetto designated by Hollywood as “faith-based” films, if at all. Now, most on the Left use the word “Christian” like a slur.

So of course the critics had to pan it. What are they going to do, sacrifice themselves to the virtual gulags? The movie can’t be good.

Everything has to be dumbed down because these critics are incapable of any critical thinking beyond what they know they must say or else. And most of them won’t have any idea what this movie is even about. The more you know about art, history, Stalin, Christianity, the more you will apperciate it.

I’m sure the bigger hammer is coming down, too. The high-minded think piece that talks about why the movie is so dangerous because Christianity is dangerous. That’s the message they send as they bow down and worship at the feet of wokeism and Islam now for some bizarre reason.

We would not need a counterculture if Hollywood wasn’t locked inside their insulated, isolated utopian cult. We would not need traditionalism if the products pushed out by Hollywood now didn’t represent moral decay behind a mask of normalcy. The pendulum always swings and now, it’s swinging away from the Caligula of our modern day culture.

It was one thing when shocking, subversive art ran counter to that necessary baseline of “normal.” Now, anything that’s normal is a threat and no matter how bizarre or strange things get, no one on the Left dares comment, lest they be seen as a moral scold.

The irony of it is that they police all language and thought lest it be too offensive. You must balance these two contradictions to survive in their world. This woman recently went viral for talking about how grotesque the art world has become now. What are we even doing here, people?

She says it so well — that this is the killling of the soul. She calls it “artistic terrorism,” but really it’s pushing the mandates of the woke agenda to function as a struggle session to root out the heretics.

“Making things like this, which coerce people ideologically and psychologically to meet an evil end, to implement some agenda.”

And so it goes with Marxism and Communism. It might look like art but if it is under the control of the state — or in our case, the Democrats — it is not free.

All Alexei has to do is tell them what they want to hear to escape his own torture, but again and again and again he refuses. They drag in his wife and his son and beat him until he can barely stand, and still he will not confess. That is when we find out what the “confession” is really about: his own shame at having corrupted his student for petty reasons when he could have helped him.

The beauty of this magnificent film is in those final moments of courage. Alexei must become the good person he needs to be, and to do so is to admit the truth and save those who need to be saved.

A pivotal moment in the film comes when his faith is tested. The horrors of mankind, of Stalin, of persecutions and oppression are so great that he is tempted to give up and turn away from Christ. He is saved again because, in Shapiro’s storytelling, it is faith that guides his main character but also faith that holds humanity together.

The midterms have proved depressing for the Right. But maybe the answer isn’t just about politics. Maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire have the best idea—to start building culture, moving people, changing minds, and reinventing what defines and who controls art.