General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Absolution (1978 film)

Absolution is a 1978 British thriller directed by Anthony Page, written by Anthony Shaffer, and starring Richard Burton as a strict Roman Catholic priest at a boys' boarding school whose pupils torment him with invented confessions, one of which turns out to describe a real killing.¹^•² Although completed in 1978, the film did not reach general release for years: it was classified for UK cinema exhibition in 1981 and opened in the United States in 1988 under the title Murder by Confession.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Anthony Page; screenplay by Anthony Shaffer, based on his 1969 stage play Play With a Gypsy¹^•⁴
Running time / genre	95 minutes; crime thriller¹
Principal cast	Richard Burton (Father Goddard), Dominic Guard (Benjie), Dai Bradley (Arthur), Billy Connolly (Blakey), Andrew Keir (Headmaster), Willoughby Gray (Brigadier Walsh)¹^•⁴
Production	Bulldog Productions; filmed at Ellesmere College, Shropshire⁵
Release history	World premiere 5 June 1978; UK cinema classification 19 October 1981 (Enterprise Pictures); US release 1 July 1988 as Murder by Confession³^•¹
Music and photography	Stanley Myers (composer), John Coquillon (cinematographer)⁶
Reception	IMDb rating 6.5/10 from about 2,200 users²

Spoilers

Plot

At St. Anthony's, an English Catholic boarding school, the disciplinarian Father Goddard rules his pupils firmly; behind his back they nickname him "God".⁴^•⁷ Two boys, Benjie Stanfield and Arthur Dyson, set out to drive the priest mad by confessing outrageous sins to him, exploiting the inviolable privacy of the confessional.²^•⁸ In one confession Benjie tells Goddard that he has accidentally killed a close friend and buried him in the forest.⁹

The joke then turns real. In the exchange that gives the film its central turn, Benjie tells the priest: "What I told you before as a joke, I made happen. I killed him", and answers Goddard's disbelief with "You must Father. What would be the point of playing the same joke twice?"² Goddard is left facing the dilemma of the seal of confession (catholic rule forbidding priests from revealing confessions): keep the secret or go to the police about a pupil's crimes.¹⁰ A Spanish-language synopsis adds that the priest's favoritism toward one pupil over another, in a story Shaffer based on a case at a German Catholic school, is what draws him into the fatal game.⁶

Production

The screenplay originated in Play With a Gypsy, a stage play Anthony Shaffer wrote in 1969; the film was produced by Bulldog Productions.⁴^•⁵ Correspondence about the screenplay between the writer Richard O'Keefe, Bulldog Productions, the law firm Richards Butler & Co, and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain, dated 7 April to 14 July 1978, survives in the Margaret Ramsay Ltd archive at the British Library.¹¹

The film was shot in its entirety at a single school location: Ellesmere College in Shropshire, a school opened in 1884 and formerly known as St. Oswald's, standing on the road between Ellesmere and Tetchill.⁵ Stanley Myers composed the score and John Coquillon was the cinematographer.⁶ Billy Connolly, cast as the traveling biker Blakey who arrives at the school looking for work, also sings the traditional song "Shady Grove" uncredited on the soundtrack.⁴^•²

According to IMDb trivia, Richard Burton turned down an offer to play King Lear on stage in Canada in order to make the film, and the Los Angeles Times described it as a project he had reportedly wanted to do for years.²^•⁷

Release and distribution

The film's release history is unusually drawn out. Kinoafisha records a world premiere on 5 June 1978 in Great Britain, but the British Board of Film Classification did not classify a cinema version until 19 October 1981, when Enterprise Pictures Ltd held the distribution rights.³^•¹ Shaffer's own website notes that the film "had been shot a year earlier but was still awaiting distribution for general release" when its novelisation appeared.⁴ A 1988 Los Angeles Times review reported that the film had been held up due to legal entanglements.⁷ In the United States it opened on 1 July 1988 under the alternative title Murder by Confession, three years after Burton's death.³^•⁷

Later home-media versions were classified separately: a 91m 28s cut for physical media in 1990 (Castle Pictures Ltd) and a 95m 24s version for physical media and streaming on 28 March 2007 (Showbox Media Group Ltd), with a 2m 59s trailer classified in July 2007.¹ German television broadcasts ran on channels including Kabel Eins Classics and MGM in the 2010s and 2020s.¹²

Critical reception

The film holds a 6.5/10 rating on IMDb from about 2,200 users.² Reviewers have been divided over Shaffer's plotting. Time Out called it "a hoary old Gothic thriller" whose last-act revelations "tumble tediously out", while crediting Burton's performance as the humourless teacher-priest with oozing "fleshly torment" as his prize pupil manipulates the confessional.⁸ Kevin Thomas, reviewing the 1988 American release for the Los Angeles Times, found the production handsome and Burton's voice remarkable but judged the film "literate but overly theatrical" and "hopelessly contrived", falling short of the "lost masterpiece" its promotion promised.⁷ A Spanish review site, decine21, scored it 6/10 and noted that the suspense builds steadily inside the single school setting, though some of the tricks recall Shaffer's celebrated stage play Sleuth ("La huella").⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1970s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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