Tense, horrible, and funny at the same time, made without frills, for both practical and aesthetic reasons, this is my favorite of Pete Walker's trilogy because it is the strongest-centered, in the characters of the priest and his main victim (the actors have a lot to do with this). It's a study in how to generate suspense with a minimum of resources. Rather than a would-be giallo, I'd identify it as an updating of 19th-century melodrama. The director plainly worked best on minuscule budgets, using them to maximum effect, but he couldn't entirely disguise their restrictions (e.g., where is everybody? don't these people ever go anywhere?).
Review of The Confessional
