One professional critic summed it up in a perfect analogy, when suggesting The Secrets We Keep is a hybrid meeting of Death and the Maiden and Leave It to Beaver.
For me, the most entertaining part of the film is seeing the almost perfect recreation of a 1959 small town in America. Every thing looks so very middle class Mayfield. That's about the best part of Yuval Adler's (um, let's just say) unauthorised re - imagining of Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden, which itself was based on the well known play of the same name. In Secrets, Naomi Rapace plays a Romanian ex - pat, Maja, married to an American doctor with a young son, who sees a man she considers to be a former nazi soldier, who was part of a gang who terrorised her family during World War 2. She almost immediately plots a course of retribution.
I like Rapace as an actress, but here she is just drawn so awkwardly. We should sympathise with her character, as we see in moody black and white flashbacks, she has been treated appallingly. But the transition between all (new) American housewife to avenging angel is just too immediate and extreme, that it ends up appearing completely unbelievable. Luckily accommodating husband Lewis, is seemingly happy to go along with her shoot first and ask questions later plan to kidnap Thomas Steinmann and interrogate him in their basement, to the point where he'll admit he was the soldier concerned.
Most of these kidnap/vigilante themed films generally have a couple of sub - threads running parallel to the main storyline. The closest we get to that here is Maja's developing relationship with Thomas's wife Rachel. Episodes with potential for ratcheting up the suspense factor, such as curious neighbours calling in the police, essentially come to nothing and have little follow - up.
Then there's all the regular dumb stuff, we as a viewing audience are asked to subscribe to in the interests of propelling the story forward. Shots being fired and plenty of shouting and screaming from the basement, just not being heard even by the curiously incurious, (around) 9 year old son Patrick. Thomas being bound,gagged and interrogated for days on end in the basement, but we never see him fed, given water to drink, or go to the bathroom. Besides the fact that there's little evidence of any organised search for the missing man, there also seems to be little interest in a bloodied, dishevelled, spaced out Maja, when she wanders the streets of the town during proceedings. And then the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card is played, when Rachel towards the end of the movie reveals her supposed matrimonial unhappiness to Maja, all because Thomas didn't tell her much about his mysterious European family. So our take has to be that it really doesn't matter much if he's disappeared off the face of the Earth.
The Secrets We Keep is a listless, unbalanced, non - engaging movie, that conspicuously seems longer than its 97 minute running time. It's story, whilst derivative to the point of being plagiaristic, deserves better than Yuval Adler is offering. It's a film that examines disturbing issues in the most unhelpful, unrealistic way possible.
For me, the most entertaining part of the film is seeing the almost perfect recreation of a 1959 small town in America. Every thing looks so very middle class Mayfield. That's about the best part of Yuval Adler's (um, let's just say) unauthorised re - imagining of Roman Polanski's Death and the Maiden, which itself was based on the well known play of the same name. In Secrets, Naomi Rapace plays a Romanian ex - pat, Maja, married to an American doctor with a young son, who sees a man she considers to be a former nazi soldier, who was part of a gang who terrorised her family during World War 2. She almost immediately plots a course of retribution.
I like Rapace as an actress, but here she is just drawn so awkwardly. We should sympathise with her character, as we see in moody black and white flashbacks, she has been treated appallingly. But the transition between all (new) American housewife to avenging angel is just too immediate and extreme, that it ends up appearing completely unbelievable. Luckily accommodating husband Lewis, is seemingly happy to go along with her shoot first and ask questions later plan to kidnap Thomas Steinmann and interrogate him in their basement, to the point where he'll admit he was the soldier concerned.
Most of these kidnap/vigilante themed films generally have a couple of sub - threads running parallel to the main storyline. The closest we get to that here is Maja's developing relationship with Thomas's wife Rachel. Episodes with potential for ratcheting up the suspense factor, such as curious neighbours calling in the police, essentially come to nothing and have little follow - up.
Then there's all the regular dumb stuff, we as a viewing audience are asked to subscribe to in the interests of propelling the story forward. Shots being fired and plenty of shouting and screaming from the basement, just not being heard even by the curiously incurious, (around) 9 year old son Patrick. Thomas being bound,gagged and interrogated for days on end in the basement, but we never see him fed, given water to drink, or go to the bathroom. Besides the fact that there's little evidence of any organised search for the missing man, there also seems to be little interest in a bloodied, dishevelled, spaced out Maja, when she wanders the streets of the town during proceedings. And then the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card is played, when Rachel towards the end of the movie reveals her supposed matrimonial unhappiness to Maja, all because Thomas didn't tell her much about his mysterious European family. So our take has to be that it really doesn't matter much if he's disappeared off the face of the Earth.
The Secrets We Keep is a listless, unbalanced, non - engaging movie, that conspicuously seems longer than its 97 minute running time. It's story, whilst derivative to the point of being plagiaristic, deserves better than Yuval Adler is offering. It's a film that examines disturbing issues in the most unhelpful, unrealistic way possible.