4 The political efcacy of torture in The Confession (1970) Hilary Neroni The depiction of torture in Costa-Gavras’s The Confession (1970) reveals the brutal methods employed by the government during the 1951 Slánský trial, one of several show trials in Communist Czechoslovakia. The flm straightforwardly argues that the government tortured the defendants in order to extract the confes- sions that they wanted, and it exposes the incredible violence of the interrogation methods. Revisiting this flm uncovers a signifcant historical diference with our contemporary debate about torture, which revolves around whether torture actually works. That is, does hurting someone’s body produce a revelation of what the person otherwise wouldn’t reveal? Can we rely on torture as a method to procure the truth? The Confession does not wrestle with these questions. Instead, it resolutely presents torture as a coercive and humiliating method that the Communists employed to force people into fake confessions. For Costa-Gavras, however, this depiction of torture leads to a revelation about the failings of the Communist Party and then more broadly leads to a larger argument about the moment at which political regimes as such fail. At the heart of most of Costa-Gavras’s flms lies this ambition to shed light on where political regimes fail the people they claim to be representing. Through this endeavor, Costa-Gavras attempts to reveal where this failure occurs, specifcally in the complicated and hard-to-see web of secret government machinations, as those in charge attempt to force reality into the narratives political regimes tell about themselves. His flms point out that at the heart of every political narrative is a structure which ultimately demands that the political regime turn on its own people. In other words, he suggests that politics as such demands a narrative that in some way or another necessarily folds in on itself, and it is the people that sufer this from this fawed structure. For example, Z (1969) looks at a Greek military-dominated right-wing government’s attempt to thwart the investigation of the assassination of a democratic Hilary Neroni, “The Political Efficacy of Torture in The Confession.” In The Films of Costa Gavras, Ed. Homer Petty, Manchester University Press, (2020)