I Confess is no soap bubble, but a profoundly circumspect investigation of the interrelation of good and evil, the vulnerability of virtue in the Manichean scheme of things, and the competitive tension between man's laws and God's. (p. 19)

Christian myth permeates the film. Villette is the serpent in Eden. He has two gardens, one where he first discovers Logan with Ruth, and one in town, which he hires Keller to tend. Ruth first meets Villette at sacramental occasions: her marriage to Pierre and Michael's ordination to the priesthood. Keller is a more human agent of evil, the Cain figure, a man without a country, driven by his evil compulsions to kill the things most dear to him, his wife and his best friend, Logan. There is even the obligatory apple in the film, eaten ostentatiously by a fat woman in front of Otto and Alma when Logan is mobbed outside the courtroom. (p. 20)

In contrasting the order of nature and the order of grace, man's two legal systems, Hitchcock draws sometimes outrageous parallels between them. Detective Larue … pursues the truth with the ugly diligence of an avenging angel….

The legal system is treated as a parody of the religious. The Crown Prosecutor … is a happy-go-lucky playboy sort who is seen balancing a glass of water backwards on his forehead at a party—an emblem for the delicate equilibrium Hitchcock conceives justice to be…. Of course the parody is serious. One must choose which justice he will serve, man's or God's, for as the film demonstrates, the two are not always compatible. (p. 22)

Two kinds of privacy bind Logan to his silence. He is silent on questions about his relationship with Ruth to preserve her honour and he is silent on the knowledge given him in confession. Similarly Ruth's silence on questions about her affair leaves the listener increasingly suspicious about what she seems to be concealing. In contrast to the lying and bitter garrulousness of Keller, the redundant suspicions of the judge and foreman, and the excessive confessions of Ruth, however, Father Logan's silence is dignified.

The shooting style has been called austere. It may be more austere than the baroque, Catholic landscape of Quebec City, with its steep streets, plethora of "direction" (one-way) signs, and Stations of the Cross, but it is far more lively. (pp. 22-3)

The film opens and closes with shots of a Gothic castle against a horror-movie sky. The church, society, and the individual mind have the murky foundation of that castle….

The characters tend to triangular arrangement in the shots…. Other triangles are completed off camera, by the character's semi-presence via telephone…. [A] two-man composition on the screen is really a two-character representation of a three-character situation….

The trinitarian structure is continued in the pattern of confessions throughout the film. Keller prefers an atypical religious confession over confessing to the police…. (p. 23)

A final confession perhaps lies in the title of the film. The "I confess" could be the Catholic Hitchcock facing his maker with appropriate penitence for having squandered his devotions upon the sensations and delights of the secular life.

But in this film Hitchcock is The Maker….

Hitchcock plays God in I Confess, sublimely aloof from the worries, regulations, rigidities, and tensions of the foolish mortals below. (p. 24)