a spicy horror story made from an odd recipe

Have you ever had a terrible day at work, and not knowing what to make for dinner, just decided to throw anything and everything into a pot and hope for the best? And the resulting dish ends up tasting scrumptious, while looking like a total dog’s dinner? Have you ever done that? Because that’s what I imagine the process was for writer-director Will Canon on the grief-filled ghostly straight-to-streaming horror movie The Confession.

Do you fancy a little bit of crime drama with your ghost stories? How about a little police procedural? A splash of time-travel might do it a world of good, in case it all starts sticking to the pan. Add in religious guilt and a creepy child, with the wettest, saddest eyes imaginable, for a bit of seasoning. If that sounds delicious and you want seconds, then The Confession might be just your film of the year. (So far. Come on, it’s only January.) It’s certainly mine.

It’s been 10 years since Canon’s 2015 Demonic, a horror movie that followed a psychologist and a police officer investigating the deaths of five people who attempted to summon a ghost. Now, the writer-director is taking another stab at the supernatural.

The Confession comes to grips with an overused yet emotionally compelling narrative: the hardship of an adult raising a child while working through their own issues, from money troubles to the loss of a loved one. Instead of watching a tired, middle-aged fella go through the pains of fatherhood, as in 1989’s Pet Sematary or 1977’s Eraserhead, The Confession puts us in the shoes of a frustrated, recently widowed mother and rock-and-roll singer-songwriter, Naomi (Italia Ricci) as she comes to grips with bringing up her young son Dylan (Zachary Golinger) by herself.

Calling it quits in California due to bad memories and a lack of money, Naomi and Dylan move back into her father’s homestead in Elbe, Texas so she can work on her latest album. The move comes with more than just physical baggage: Naomi’s ultra-religious father, Arthur, recently drowned himself in the lake by his house. Worse, not even a week after the move, Naomi finds an old tape Arthur left her that explains how he once killed a man, Royce Cobb, to prevent evil from going after Arthur’s family. Now Cobb is back, and haunting Naomi and Dylan. Cobb is a terrifying vision from the get-go, tormenting Naomi’s dreams and using rats to trick and torment mother and son. As Arthur confesses on his tape, a “debt is due,” and it looks like the evil won’t be satisfied until a sacrifice is made.

What follows is an 87-minute hotpot of different genres that somehow remains cohesive right up until the finale. The Confession’s beginning feels like Canon is aiming at the classic “kid possessed by an evil spirit” trope from films like Children of the Corn or The Exorcist. While it doesn’t necessarily not go there, I was pleasantly surprised to see Canon’s focus was mostly on Naomi teaming up with her childhood best friend, investigative journalist Grayson (Scott Mechlowicz), to uncover the nitty-gritty details about her father’s actions, and their effect on the small community of Elbe.

Parenthood, and the idea of what a world would be like without parents to shepherd children through it, plays a significant part in The Confession, but it simply isn’t as fascinating as the mystery that plagues Naomi throughout the film. What evil could be so terrible that it drove her father — such a deeply religious man that her rock-star status estranged them for the rest of his life — to commit murder?

The downside to that question being so paramount is that the question of whatever is plaguing Dylan isn’t all that interesting. Naomi’s music puts a strain on her relationship with her son, who isn’t pleased to move away from California, even if it does benefit them both. But she’s fiercely protective of his individuality, even getting into fights over it, in part because she feels Arthur stifled her own upbringing. While Canon attempts to remind viewers that Dylan is a significant factor in Naomi’s decision-making in The Confession, through constant back-and-forth phone calls highlighting the boy’s increasingly strange behavior, the Dylan subplot doesn’t feel half as important as the Arthur murder mystery. Given that the movie’s marketing places significant focus on Dylan’s creep factor, that isn’t great for anyone coming into the film for the spooky-kid scares.

In fact, while the blend of family drama, science fiction, procedural investigation, and supernatural horror is far more coherent than such a mishmash should be, sometimes the bloat becomes distractingly obvious. One intended-to-be-tense scene has Naomi and Grayson interviewing Cobb’s daughter Luellen (Allie McCullough), with Naomi realizing her laptop is open and facing Luellen — the laptop Naomi just used to record a copy of her father’s murder confession. The setup and Naomi’s response are so ludicrously set up that the scene feels cheesy, even comedic. Moments later, as if Canon suddenly remembered he was making a horror movie about a creepy kid, Naomi receives an alarming phone call from Dylan’s school, reporting on his latest wild behavior. It’s such a jarring juxtaposition, with contrived, unnecessary tension on one end and actual horror elements on the other.

Image: Quiver Distribution

But while The Confession suffers from too many ingredients in the pot, so much about it elevates it from a dud to a must-watch. Ricci has easy chemistry with every one of her scene partners, and she captures the anxiety of being a newly single mom and widow with equal grit and grace. I also love that Naomi doesn’t suffer fools gladly. When the police officer helping her case asks her to sign an autograph for his wife, she gleefully writes in his notebook that he should just do his job. When Dylan’s headmaster questions her parenting, she rips him a new one.

Male characters get a lot more opportunities to be condescendingly assertive and angry without facing consequences, because they’re cool and misunderstood. It paints a beautiful picture to have a woman take on that role. Women in movies and TV are so rarely allowed to be angry or cocky. That makes Naomi a refreshing character — kind of a jerk, but a vulnerable one who draws empathy. Watching her in The Confession feels as good as watching Pluribus’ Carol Sturka for the first time. Carol and Naomi are both undeniable heroes who draw a rooting interest, rough edges and all. And while I don’t love how the menacing-kid subplot plays out, Golinger is also fantastic. At times, it’s captivatingly unclear whether the boy speaking is Dylan, or the evil possessing him. One particular dialogue delivery, where he tells Naomi about how he fantasizes about taking her head to school for show-and-tell, is downright unsettling.

I’m not convinced that Canon knows what The Confession actually is: a ghost story, a horror movie, a police/family drama, or something positioned between all of those. But while it’s a hotpot of mismatched elements, The Confession does excel at blending all these genres into a compelling edge-of-your-seat flavor. I got invested in the mythology and mystery behind Cobb’s death, why it deeply affected Naomi’s father as a man of God, and how Naomi’s own conflicted faith colors her view of the supernatural events around her. The Confession isn’t particularly scary, but the horror of neglect and grief is expertly woven throughout the plot in other ways. What’s left is a tale that’s much like a hearty but far too starchy stew — it will stick to your stomach for days after you finish it.

The Confession is now available for rental or purchase on Apple TV, Amazon, and other digital platforms.