Review: As Pulp Fiction, The Secrets We Keep Never Goes into Overdrive

The film is ultimately too tidy to embrace anything truly startling or unexpected, either stylistically or narratively.

The Secrets We Keep
Photo: Bleecker Street

Set in an archetypal American suburb in the 1950s, Yuval Adler’s The Secrets We Keep centers the wartime trauma of a Romanian woman, Maja (Noomi Rapace), who’s convinced that a recent transplant to the neighborhood, Thomas (Joel Kinnaman), is the Nazi who raped her and helped execute her family during the war. Playing out primarily as a modest three-hander, with Maja’s husband, Lewis (Chris Messina), essentially functioning as the arbitrator between his wife and Thomas, the film is initially fixated on probing the thorny nature of a woman’s memory, so tinged with remorse and anger.

The film is at its most taut during its opening act, when Maja’s initial assumption about Thomas leads her to assault and kidnap the man, leaving him tied up in her basement to be interrogated and, potentially, murdered. Here, Maja’s emotional instability gives way to an encroaching doubt, which is only further intensified by Lewis. Although he knew his wife suffered from nightmares about the war, he was unaware of the details about her horrific experiences, and thus hesitates to believe that Thomas is the man that she thinks he is. Adler and Ryan Covington’s script glistens with delicate ambiguities during these early stretches, not only bringing into question the moral rectitude of Maja’s vigilante tactics, but also the logical, though perhaps disloyal, steps taken by Lewis to mitigate the damage caused by his wife’s recklessness, as well as the potential innocence of the bewildered Thomas.

When the film homes in on the rising tensions between Maja and Lewis as they struggle to determine the endgame to their self-made quagmire, it remains a penetrating examination of a marriage that’s suddenly thrust into the irresolvable anguish of the past. As the helpless husband—stuck between fully supporting his wife’s bloodlust and ensuring himself that Thomas, a seemingly mild-mannered Swiss man, is the monster she says he is—Messina brings a crucial mix of empathy and pragmatism to his role, helping to ground an otherwise outlandish scenario. And Thomas’s pushback against Maja’s gung-ho yearning for retribution complicates what could otherwise have been a straightforward revenge tale, both in terms of the effects that her decision has on their entire family, including their son (Jackson Vincent), and the trust issues that arise when Lewis learns the secrets of her traumatic past.

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But as The Secrets We Keep opens itself up to peer at the world outside of Maja and Lewis’s home, it not only begins to really stretch the plausibility of its scenario, it also focuses more unwaveringly on the mystery of whether or not Thomas is actually a Nazi in hiding. The meddling of a next-door neighbor (Jeff Pope) and a police officer (David Maldonado) offers little more than cheap suspense as to whether or not Maja and Lewis will be found out. And the late-in-the-game arrival of Thomas’s wife, Rachel (Amy Seimetz), exists for no other reason than to highlight her fast rapport with Maja, as well as, in a distasteful attempt to make us further question Thomas’s guilt, to reveal that she, too, is Jewish.

These supporting characters are so thinly sketched that they come to feel like expats from some stereotypical drama about ’50s suburbia. And while the film uses them as a means to suggest that Maja and Lewis’s illegal acts, and the dirty little secret hidden away in their basement, are representative of the dark underbelly of post-war America, it’s an impression that doesn’t transcend triteness. Adler flirts with pulp, particularly during Maja’s more violent interrogation sessions with Thomas, but the film is ultimately too tidy to embrace anything truly startling or unexpected, either stylistically or narratively. And as The Secrets We Keep settles into the predictable trajectory of a more traditional mystery, Maja’s once intense rage and indignation is stifled as all clouds of uncertainty are conveniently cleared away.

Score: 
 Cast: Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman, Chris Messina, Amy Seimetz, Jackson Dean Vincent, Madison Paige Jones, Jeff Pope, David Maldonado, Ed Amatrudo  Director: Yuval Adler  Screenwriter: Yuval Adler, Ryan Covington  Distributor: Bleecker Street  Running Time: 97 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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