Absolution (1981)

Here's a tiny sub-genre for you: boys' boarding school horror movies, with angelic pupils addicted to semi-Satanic evil and conscience-stricken masters who wind up at their mercy. A murderous class menaces David Hemmings in Unman, Wittering and Zigo; a plot is played out in a deserted school during the holidays in Fear in the Night; and a mystery cult operates in Catholic School in a lone American contribution, Sidney Lumet's Child's Play. Though girls's schools offer more obvious exploitation elements (cf: The Beguiled, The House That Screamed, Satan's School for Girls), even the apparently mild likes of The Browing Version has a certain darkness that can easily shade into the actual horror of if ..., contrasting pristine playing fields and immaculate uniforms with vicious bullying, homoerotic interludes and entrenched class divisions. The touchstone of all this might well be the unexplored backstory of Miles's expulsion from school in The Turn of the Screw, which even Michael Winner's The Nightcomers doesn't go into in detail, and certainly all the British cinema's sinister schoolboys - Martin Stephens in Village of the Damned, Mark Lester in Night Hair Child - owe a lot to Henry James's well-spoken, well-bred little creep.

Absolution was screenwriter Anthony Shaffer's follow-up to The Wicker Man, and it has a somewhat similar structure: a deeply-religious authority figure is tempted, manipulated and finally sacrificed, destroyed by his attempts to help out a child who is also a subliminal object of desire (here, though, the protagonist thinks a victim is a murderer rather than the other way round). Like Sleuth, which Shaffer wrote as a play before it was a film, and The Wicker Man, Absolution has one of those labyrinth plots which leads the main character and the viewer down a series of blind alleys that pay off in horrible irony. It plants rather too obviously its key clue in the early scenes, which makes the mystery more transparent than it ought to be. Richard Burton's priest is even more of a sucker than Edward Woodward's policeman, with the difference that an audience is more likely to sneer at his stupidity than share his growing awareness of an impossible plight. One of Shaffer's strengths is dialogue, and a many scenes here have a play-like sense of the nastiness flowing under the genial words - "pull up a pew," says a schoolboy playing a cruel trick on a crippled classmate - but also leave very little for director Anthony Page to do once the actors (mostly very good) make their points.

The setting is St Anthony's, a depressing Catholic school in green English countryside, and the central character is Father Goddard (Richard Burton), an old-fashioned disciplinarian who might also be a repressed homosexual with predictable paedophile leanings (you'd call this character a cliché, but my Irish friends tell me you can read about him every week in the Dublin press). His obvious favourite is golden boy Benjie Stanfield (Dominic Guard), whom he indulges in lessons and is trying to persuade towards the priesthood, while he has a deep but troubling dislike for the second-cleverest boy in class, the lame Arthur Dyson (Dai Bradley). Benjie, who bullies the eager Arthur mercilessly and gets away with it, is turned off by Goddard's longing looks and tempted to hang about in the woods with hippie tramp Blakey (Billy Connolly), which leads to a deeply closeted celibate gay triangle. In the confessional, Goddard hears Benjie own up to having killed Blakey, whose body the priest finds in the woods.

As he wrestles with that favourite plot device of Catholic thrillers the seal of the confessional (cf: I Confess), Goddard is told in another confession that Arthur is to be the next victim. When he finds the boy's leg-brace stuck comically out of a shallow grave, the disappointed priest batters Benjie to death with a spade, whereupon it turns out that Arthur (whose talent for mimicry was set up early on) has been doing Benjie's voice in the confessional. The boy also murdered the hippie, using that William Brown weapon-of-choice, the catapult. At the fade-out, Goddard is as ravingly mad as Burton - who was working up a 70s career as a mini-horror star with Bluebeard, Hammersmith is Out and The Medusa Touch - can make him, and torn between confessing his sins and committing suicide.

It's quite something that there is even a film which pits Richard Burton against Billy Connolly, and their acting styles face off against each other surprisingly well. Even at this stage of his career, Burton was capable of an onscreen intensity that was too rarely-exploited - he played a similar role as a psychiatrist wrapped up in a beautiful monster boy patient in Equus, scripted by Shaffer's twin brother Peter - and this is one of the projects (like 1984) that seems to have engaged his full attention. He underplays fiercely at the outset, and the mere presence of Connolly's Scots free spirit-cum-drunken loon is enough to make him rigid with inexpressible rage, though he goes off the rails in the nighttime wanderings-about-the-woods scenes and winds up with a riveting display of ultimate ham.

The rest of the cast are fine - especially the kids, Guard and Bradley - and it's nice to see such friendly (or sinister) faces as Andrew Keir (the headmaster), Hilary Mason (of Don't Look Now), Preston Lockwood, Brian Glover (1st Policeman), Brook Williams, Willoughby Gray, Sharon Duce and Trevor Martin (the stage Dr Who) in support. The slightly distorted wide-angle photography (John Coquillion, returning to Britain after his Peckinpah period) is creepily evocative of a rural England torn between oppressive civilisation and anarchic lunacy. However, Page's plodding direction makes it feel like one of those Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense TV movies that happens to have had a dialogue polish by a proper writer. Made in 1978, it was shelved for four years before gaining a tiny UK release; it has apparently been retitled Murder By Confession on some US versions. In 1979, Shaffer published novelisations of Absolution and (with Robin Hardy) The Wicker Man.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Ten Years of Terror: British Horror Films of the 1970s, edited by Harvey Fenton and David Flint. FAB Press.

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