Bleecker Street
Vengeance against those who’ve wronged you is a classic trope for pop culture, as is the idea of questioning said vengeance. It adds more intrigue if it’s a serious crime, and even more if it’s an historically relevant situation. Naturally it’s hard to get more awful than a bunch of Nazis assaulting and murdering people. It’s always more fun to see someone get vengeance against a Nazi, that’s why the best Indiana Jones movies use them as villains. When you try to get more complicated though, it’s a difficult line to walk.
The Secrets We Keep comes from director Yuval Adler which he co-wrote with Ryan Covington. But note that unlike some writer/director paired movies, Yuval Adler is nowhere to be seen in the movie. Take notes, other lower budget movies! The film takes place in the late 1950s in a classic American suburb, with mostly white people but a few others dotting the landscape. Noomi Rapace stars as Maja, a Romanian immigrant who met her husband Lewis (Chris Messina) who served overseas as a military doctor.
The two have a normal sort of household with their son, and they seem to be in love and in sync despite their different backgrounds. But the drama starts when Maja spots a mysterious tall man who she seems to recognize — he has an accent, but it’s not significant. She follows and stalks him, seeing him with his own wife and daughter, but then isolates him and attacks, kidnapping him and tying him up in their basement.
But then we see why — Maja believes this man is Karl, a German soldier who assaulted her and other Romani refugees, participating as well in the death of Maja’s sister. The man, bloodied and pleading, insists his name is Thomas and he’s a Swiss immigrant, and wasn’t even fighting in the war. Fairly soon, Maja reveals what’s she done to her husband, who is horrified — and wants to be sure that Maja is sure.
The problem is that Maja’s trauma has led to frequent nightmares, and her memories of the assault are fragmented — even if she is sure that she recognizes the eyes of her attacker. It gets further complicated as Maja wants to torture the man to get him to confess, while simultaneously accidentally befriending his wife. A few little twists and turns happen along the way, but it’s ultimately a journey into vengeance and trauma, and the needs of the victims to feel closure.
It feels like a sort of role Noomi Rapace has done before — certainly not the first time she’s played Romani or an assault victim, but it’s something she has a great way of getting into. Although we don’t know why she’s attacking the man at first, her acting and the directing keep us invested enough to at least start on her side.
Chris Messina does well here too, in a role that’s a bit more complicated than we’ve usually seen from him as he tries to show what it’s like to change how you see someone in a new, awful way. And Joel Kinnaman does a good job here too, playing it with just enough uncertainty that you are just as tense waiting to find out the truth as everyone else in the movie.
It’s a tense, well paced thriller, that feels like a better version of this sort of storyline — I definitely feel like I’ve seen the ‘victim kidnaps assaulter but maybe they got it wrong’ story before, but this feels like a pretty good version of it.
It doesn’t show the scenes of assault in anything but dark shots — nothing glamorized here. Perhaps it’s a bit simplistic in its conclusions, and perhaps there’s not too much below the surface, but it’s entertaining for what it is.
The Secrets We Keep has a run time of 1 hour 37 minutes and is rated R for strong violence, rape, some nudity, language and brief sexuality.
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