The worst sin of “The Secrets We Keep” is not that it so blatantly and flagrantly rips off Ariel Dorfman’s play and subsequent movie “Death and the Maiden” — although if the Chilean author wanted to sue for a credit, he’s certainly got a case.
The history of art is the history of creators borrowing from each other, whether they call it homage or reference or appropriation. What grates about director Yuval Adler and his co-writer Ryan Covington pilfering so obviously from Dorfman’s work is that they haven’t done anything particularly interesting with it.
Is there potential in changing the setting of “Death and the Maiden” from an unnamed Latin American country to the USA of the 1950s, still reeling in various ways from World War II? Absolutely. Do Adler and Covington achieve that potential? Not in the slightest.
Noomi Rapace stars as Maja, trying her best to live the American Dream as a mother of a young son and wife to Lewis (Chris Messina), whom she married in Europe when he served with the medical corps in 1946, after the end of fighting. Rather than present Maja as a paragon of Better Homes and Garden living who snaps, Rapace makes her dark and brooding from the get-go, constantly smoking and peering out at the world behind sunglasses. (She resembles an amalgam of various Helena Bonham-Carter characters in the Tim Burton universe.)
While in the park with her son one day, she hears a man whistle for his dog, and she feels that whistle in her spine. After following the man (Joel Kinnaman) home, she becomes convinced that he is the Nazi officer who raped her and murdered her sister during the war. So convinced, in fact, that she kidnaps him and — after failing to summon the nerve to shoot him and bury him in a shallow grave — she brings him to her basement to torture him and to force him to admit his crimes, even though he insists he’s innocent and that he sat out the war in Switzerland.
“The Secrets We Keep” takes a stab at some new plot ideas; in explaining to Lewis what’s happening, Maja reveals to him for the first time her Roma background, and Maja investigates the man’s past by befriending his distraught wife (Amy Seimetz) under the guise of being neighborly. But neither of these threads leads anywhere particularly interesting.
It doesn’t help that “Secrets” shares one of the main flaws of Roman Polanski’s screen version of “Death and the Maiden”; in both cases, the director has cast actresses with an action background, presumably to make sure they could handle the intense physicality of the role, but both actresses have created such indelible heroes — “Death and the Maiden” star Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley and Rapace’s Lisabeth Salander — that it’s hard for audiences to doubt the character’s sanity. Without that doubt, drama is replaced by a simple countdown to the finale, with any question of justification or morality falling by the wayside.
Kinnaman, never the most dynamic of actors, isn’t able to make much of a role that forces him to be bound and gagged for much of the running time, so it’s up to Messina (bringing active energy to a passive character) and Seimetz to provide any sense of depth or humanity. Equally credible is the production design and the costumes by Christina Flannery (“Semper Fi”), which capture an Eisenhower-era refinery town without going overboard on mid-century pizzazz. German cinematographer Kolja Brandt also strikes the right balance of dusty dreariness that never becomes excessively stark.
There’s an interesting story to be told here — indeed, it already has been — but almost nothing about “The Secrets We Keep” sticks in the memory.
9 Essential Alfred Hitchcock Movies to Watch on Peacock, From 'Psycho' to 'Vertigo' (Photos)
Good evening. Master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock was born on Friday the 13th back in August 1899, and while the great filmmaker's movies and his TV shows have always been widely available for aspiring film students and classic movie lovers, Peacock has lumped many of his classics in one place. There are 14 of the director's films now available to stream through NBCUniversal's ad-supported service. The trick with Hitchcock is, even writing a top 10 list of the director's best movies would be leaving off some great ones. So below is a list of his essential titles that best define his style and penchant for thrills, and check out a teaser video for all the titles here.
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"Shadow of a Doubt" (1943) -
Peacock doesn't have any of Hitchcock's early films before he left Britain and his movies started getting Oscar buzz, but "Shadow of a Doubt" was one of his first fully American movies, with a cast including Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten that Hitchcock even described as his favorite film he made. A man and his niece, both named Charlie, meet and develop an instant bond until she realizes her uncle isn't what he seems. It's a film about being removed from the world you thought you knew and how everything looks grimmer from outside your protective bubble.
Universal Pictures
"Rope" (1948) -
"Rope" is an early example of an entire film shown in a single, unbroken take. The story involves two people who murder a man, hide his body in a trunk in the center of a room and then host a dinner party surrounding it to prove they've committed the perfect crime. Hitchcock felt the suspense would be lost if the camera cut away, so he wrote sections of the movie in chunks to correspond to the size of a reel of film and then would hide the edit as the camera passed behind a chair or person's back. "Rope" remains one of Hitchcock's most fascinating experiments, even if he once said that the experiment "didn't work."
Warner Bros.
"Rear Window" (1954) -
James Stewart plays a photographer confined to his apartment and wheelchair after suffering an injury when he spies something suspicious from his neighbor's window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder. It's a tense examination of voyeurism and how our suspicions can get the better of us. But it's also one of Hitchcock's most emotional films for the tiny details about how the lonely people Stewart watches go about their day, and it's a great example of how Hitchcock uses editing and simple clues to drive our imaginations wild.
Paramount Pictures
"The Trouble With Harry" (1955) -
As the tagline goes, the trouble with Harry is that he's dead, and no one can seem to figure out what to do with his body. "The Trouble With Harry" is Hitchcock's one straight comedy, a blend of screwball and deadpan, offbeat humor in which people are lustful, clueless or as suspicious as in any Hitchcock movie, but with a very different tone. The film also features Jerry Mathers before he was in "Leave it to Beaver" and Shirley MacLaine in her first film role.
Paramount Pictures
"The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956) -
Hitchcock's greatest trope was of stories about innocent men wrongly accused and roped into something greater. And he told that story not once, but twice in "The Man Who Knew Too Much," which he remade from his 1934 film as a more seasoned director with bigger stars and a bigger budget in 1956. Peacock only has the remake, but it's as good of a place to start with Hitchcock as any, as it also features Doris Day's performance of the Oscar-winning song "Que Sera, Sera."
Paramount Pictures
"Vertigo" (1958) -
"Vertigo" back in 2012 snatched the title away from "Citizen Kane" as the best movie of all time in a famous critics poll, and it's in part because his surreal, psychological and thrilling head trip about two broken hearts combines all of the attributes that made Hitchcock's films special. His movies often featured icy, blonde women who men were obsessed with, and the story of James Stewart's obsession with Kim Novak in "Vertigo" most closely resembles Hitchcock's own desires and controlling qualities as a director.
Paramount Pictures
"Psycho" (1960) -
Hitchcock broke so many norms with "Psycho" that helped to change Hollywood movies forever. He proved you could get rid of the film's top-billed star Janet Leigh less than halfway into the movie, he defied censorship standards by showing characters using a toilet on screen, and he shocked audiences with a fiendish twist, even putting in place a rule that prevented late entrants into a screening. But above all, he proved that with sinister lighting, framing and an anxiety-inducing score by Bernard Hermann alone, you can still make a terrifying masterpiece.
Universal Pictures
"The Birds" (1963) - "The Birds" was an early precursor for horror films like "Jaws" for its special effects and its economical thrills, with Hitchcock replacing a traditional score with bird sound effects that were even more chilling. But the film has some complex themes about love, sexuality and violence even if it seems like just a movie about killer birds.
Universal Pictures
"Frenzy" (1972) -
Hitchcock had lost some of his mojo by the '70s when auteur directors were making hyper-violent, kinetic and artful statements of movies that did away with the Old Hollywood thriller staples. But "Frenzy" is Hitchcock returning to form with a murder mystery of another innocent man accused, and it's a late-career gem that's also easily his most violent film about a serial killer responsible for a series of "necktie murders."
Universal Pictures
All of these films don't even scratch the surface of Hitchcock's best. Peacock also currently has "Saboteur," "Marnie," "Family Plot," "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz" available for streaming, as well as his shows "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "Alfred Hitchcock Hour." And some of his other classics are available across other streaming services, including "North By Northwest" (HBO Max), "To Catch a Thief" (Amazon Prime) or "Strangers on a Train" (DirecTV).
MGM
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14 of the master of suspense’s movies and two of his series are available on the ad-supported streaming service
Good evening. Master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock was born on Friday the 13th back in August 1899, and while the great filmmaker's movies and his TV shows have always been widely available for aspiring film students and classic movie lovers, Peacock has lumped many of his classics in one place. There are 14 of the director's films now available to stream through NBCUniversal's ad-supported service. The trick with Hitchcock is, even writing a top 10 list of the director's best movies would be leaving off some great ones. So below is a list of his essential titles that best define his style and penchant for thrills, and check out a teaser video for all the titles here.
Getty Images
Universal Pictures
