A confession review: a real-life drama on suffering, heroism and justice

A plethora of television has been centred on the backs of murders of dead women. Viewers

wouldn’t be blamed for complaining about how many dead bodies they’ve seen. However,

A Confession is worth the watch as the true story shocked hundreds of people.

ITV is consistent of gloomy crime dramas which see vanished young girls gazing out of

missing posters, grieving parents struggling to hold back their tears and detectives spending

hours glaring upon CCTV footage.

ITV’s latest venture, A Confession, is a six-part drama series. It is the dramatization of a true

story that plays perfectly as a tale of heroism: how Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher

(played by Martin Freeman) opted to violate police protocol in order to catch serial killer,

Christopher Halliwell, and in doing so, sacrificed his whole career and reputation.

The six-part drama foregrounds and fleshes out the missing and their families, while DCI

Fulcher and his team’s painstaking police work gradually assembles to uncover the horror

that is yet to come.

A Confession incorporates a horrid sense of voyeurism as the six-part drama is based on true

events. Sian O’Callaghan’s disappearance and murder in 2011 has supplied material for

writer, Jeff Pope, to construct different plot twists and cliff hangers.

Following the ending of the first episode, we are left clueless to the fact that there has been

a murder at all. We are left to believe the young woman is still alive, only that she was

missing after a night out. DCI Fulcher interrogated Halliwell, who he believed knew the

young girl’s whereabouts, without a solicitor present as the detective knew that if Halliwell

was taken in there would no longer be a chance of finding O’Callaghan alive, as he would

have the right to say, ‘no comment’.

It is an upsetting dramatization of sad events that asks – especially in later episodes –

intense questions about not only how we want to, but how we should obtain justice for the

missing and murdered.