Daily Wire film The Confession is a warning to American audiences charmed by communism

Lowe plays Alexi, a former professor-turned-divorced drunk who finds himself under interrogation by his former student Vladimir, played by Franco. Alexi rots in the infamous Lubyanka Prison as Vladimir demands he sign a statement against a priest, Father Mukulski, under threat for speaking out against the state. Alexi's wife Anya, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, is dragged in as well and used as a threat against Alexi. If he doesn't sign, she and their son Sasha will face death or worse.

The film is in the spirit of classic literature that exposes communism and authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and Russia. While watching, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita comes to mind, also Kafka's Trial, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his years of time served in Siberian gulags, the plays of Václav Havel, even Terry Gilliam's Brazil. And this is the tradition of storytelling that screenwriter Ben Shapiro and director Václav Marhoul are intending to tap into. The fight of a man against the state, the fight of a man to preserve his true self, that self that goes beyond Earth, that was given to us perhaps by God alone, against all odds, from here no further. Can a man stand alone against everything seeking to tear him down, limb from limb?

The questions are lasting even as the film is so much in the genre of those old stories and true to the history of the era that the end is a foregone conclusion. It’s a quiet film that asks the questions we ask ourselves in our comfortable homes, late at night, when the trappings of our contemporary life feel as fleeting and as temporary as they no doubt are.

The fight of Alexi in Lubyanka is the fight of Nigerians under threat of the Islamic sword, the fight of academics in the west who struggle with the question of speaking truth against trans, the fight of Hong Kong dissidents like Jimmy Lai, dragged to the mainland and tossed into prison over their pro-democracy activism. And of course, in bringing this film out now, Shapiro and The Daily Wire are attempting to remind all of us Americans that this conversation is at hand again and still. Truth or convenient lies?

One by one, Vladimir parades family members before Alexi, each of them urging him to sign his same to falsehoods to save them, to save himself. But Alexi, who appears so resigned to his fate that he has given up the fight for life altogether, believes (rightfully, as we know from history) that once a man is accused he is already guilty. He tries to tell this to his family that their lives are already in ruin, there is no saving them, but his wife and son are believers in the propaganda that a confession with buy their freedom. There is no freedom in a communist state except within an inner self that none can touch.

The scenes are dark, the atmosphere is dirty, the conversations in the cell between prisoners, Alexi, a musician Dmitri, a character known as "The Jew," played by Nick Nolte, and Richard Brake's Bogdan, a former government official, are at the moments where men become mud. The Confession shows these men fighting that fate. The questions they ask, the truths they cling to, are ones each of us think about when we imagine state overreach.

Do you do as the state asks though it would betray your soul? Do you condemn another man to save yourself? A conversation in the cell among the doomed men reveals the fundamental question of the film, is there something beyond this Earth that sustains man or is it bread alone?

“There's only one love that matters: the love of the state for its future,” Bogdan says, revealing that “the state is the soul of a people. You think of the individual as though he matters. The individual doesn’t matter at all. The soul of the people is what matters. That soul is expressed across the pages of history.”

“Bread,” he said, is what he believes in. What becomes of a nation that turns every individual to mud to ensure the greater good?

Alexi must believe in something more.

"I should have taught you," Alexi tells his son Sasha, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, when he too is dragged into Lubyanka to demand his father turn on the priest. "To be a man you must believe in something greater than the party. Greater than steel, than power and machines, than iron foundries, and yes, even greater than bread. You must believe in what it means to be a man."

Alexi didn’t always believe this himself, it took losing everything and finding Christ, introduced to him by the father he’s been asked to condemn, that gave him the strength to hold truth over lies. As the film goes on, the question becomes can he sustain that strength, can he persevere and remain true to himself and his faith? Can we?