FrightFest review – The Confession (2025)
There have been two or three horror spins on The Pied Piper lately. Writer-director Will Canon (Demonic, 2015) doesn’t simply reimagine the fairy tale as a slasher or straight ghost story but plays with familiar elements – music, rats, lost children, a guilty town – in a fresh, distinctive context.
Established singer-songwriter Naomi (Italia Ricci) moves from Los Angeles back to her home town – Elbe, Texas, aptly named since it’s a place of exile – with her son Dylan (Zachary Golinger) after the death of her husband. Her preacher father has ambiguously committed suicide, and Naomi finds a cassette tape in which he seems to confess to the murder of a missing town troublemaker. Naomi reconnects with her teenage best friend Grayson (Scott Mechlowicz) even as she has trouble with Dylan – who not only doesn’t want to be here and is acting out with stunts like taking a severed goat head to school but may be the target of a malign supernatural force.
Canon makes unusual, interesting character choices which go against expectations – characters who seem as if they might be stereotypes, like the missing blackguard’s jittery daughter (Allie McCulloch), are surprising …and though there’s some bristling against the strict, perhaps hypocritical Christianity in which Naomi was raised it’s a rare horror film which doesn’t resort to caricature fundamentalists. Harling (Terence Rosemore), a seminary drop-out who believes in Jesus but isn’t keen on the church, is the handy savant with background information on the curse. Naomi and Grayson, who have an interestingly complicated non-romantic relationship, make common cause against an evil spirit out to snatch a couple of children but also warm to the task of following clues left around the property by Naomi’s father and start enjoying the Nancy Drew aspect of the sleuthing.
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