'Words on Bathroom Walls' Practices Confession — For All The Wrong Reasons

Courtesy of LD Entertainment and Roadside Attractions.

(REVIEW) “Words on Bathroom Walls,” a new movie from LD Entertainment and Roadside Attractions, is all about the importance of confession. 

The movie opens in theaters on Aug. 21, one of the first to have a theatrical release post COVID-19 shutdowns. AMC and Regal theaters reopen this weekend where states allow. 

Based on the book of the same name, “Words on Bathroom Walls” follows teenager Adam as he finishes his last term of high school. Adam has a severe case of paranoid schizophrenia, something that got him kicked out of his previous school. He transfers to a Catholic school in the area—the perfect setting for a lesson on confession, right?

But the movie gets the point of confession entirely wrong. 

Adam’s schizophrenia is unsuccessfully treated at the beginning of the movie. He begins taking an experimental drug that’s meant to cure all of his symptoms and rid him of the voices in his head. The school admits him under the agreement—which Adam, his mother and stepfather all-too-eagerly accept—that he’ll make exceptional grades and take this medication.

It’s brushed off jokingly that Adam and his entire family aren’t believers: his mom tells him that “Catholics are more about attendance, anyway” when he asks if his non-belief is a problem. 

Besides, this school is the only one in the area that will take him. It’s something that, from the beginning, paints the school as one that’s inclusive and graceful. 

Which is what makes its ultimate reputation extremely confusing. 

On the day he visits the school for the first time, Adam meets Maya in an empty bathroom selling homework to another student. She’s clearly going to be Adam’s ally at the school, and is the stereotypical “cool girl” that says she wants to get rid of “the patriarchy” and ends up in a traditional high school romance by the end. 

It’s strange that none of the students at the school seem to actually be Catholic. Granted, we only witness conversations between Adam and Maya, but each of them have at least one line in which they express distaste with Catholicism.

I never went to Catholic school, so maybe every student that attends every Catholic school is anti-Catholic in one way or another—but that seems unlikely. 

As Adam gets to know Maya, struggles with his family and eventually decides to stop taking his successful medication, he goes to confession three times.

The first time is mandatory, and the second time he comes only to ask the priest for girl advice. 

The priest, the only developed Christian character in the movie, is a gracious sport despite Adam’s flippancy for the act of confession: he softly recites Bible verses and gives gentle advice. 

Even the third time—which hardly serves as a confession—as Adam sits in a chapel pew, shouts at the priest and laughs at God, the priest shows him nothing but grace. 

And the priest is the one to visit Adam and offer his support after he’s had another psychotic breakdown, been institutionalized and suspended from school. It all seems to be leading to an inevitable narrative end: Adam’s going to complete a confession, and he’s going to do it right. 

What happens instead is that he gets checked out of his institution on a whim (something that also seems realistically impossible) to interrupt his graduation. 

He first berates the school administration for suspending him despite the fact that he violated the initial agreement and created harm for himself and other students.

He does go on to “confess”: he tells the school he has schizophrenia and stands proudly behind it, unconcerned with how he’s going to treat it or how he’s hurt people in the past. It’s nowhere near the kind of confession that admits to sin, repents and asks for forgiveness.

Adam’s schizophrenia has become an emblem of his individuality. It’s something he can celebrate—so what if it comes with consequences for himself and others? This entire scene feels blasphemous to those who struggle with and work to improve their mental health, whether they have schizophrenia or anything else.

Adam later says with utter disdain that the school got enough “shitty PR” after the incident to hand him his diploma. It’s a resolution that doesn’t make sense.

The school was nothing but kind to him, seen in their willingness to accept him when no other school would and in the priest, who is Adam’s only steady figure of wisdom and grace. Where, exactly, did the Catholic school go wrong? 

The movie, through a series of shallow one-liners, tells its viewers that the school’s biggest flaw was being Catholic—which feels a little unfair, considering that it uses the predominantly Catholic value and practice of confession to drive its plot and morality.

I’m the last person to say that all Christian media needs to serve as a propagandic conversion tract. But to use it as a springboard for secular “wokeness” is equally as wrong. 

It unfortunately comes as no surprise to me that the “confession” at the end is misrepresented. 

Because “Words on Bathroom Walls” doesn’t seem to understand the motivations of Catholics as faithful Christians (and actively disrespects their faith), it misses the point of confession. What results is a movie that feels ingenuine and two-dimensional. 

Jillian Cheney is a Poynter-Koch fellow for Religion Unplugged who loves consuming good culture and writing about it. She also reports on American Protestantism and Evangelical Christianity. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.