I Confess is no soap bubble, but a profoundly circumspect investigation of the interrelation of good and evil, the vulnerability of virtue in the Manichean scheme of things, and the competitive tension between man's laws and God's. (p. 19)

Christian myth permeates the film. Villette is the serpent in Eden. He has two gardens, one where he first discovers Logan with Ruth, and one in town, which he hires Keller to tend. Ruth first meets Villette at sacramental occasions: her marriage to Pierre and Michael's ordination to the priesthood. Keller is a more human agent of evil, the Cain figure, a man without a country, driven by his evil compulsions to kill the things most dear to him, his wife and his best friend, Logan. There is even the obligatory apple in the film, eaten ostentatiously by a fat woman in front of Otto and Alma when Logan is...