What a relief! I’d been dreading seeing Maddie’s Secret, a new film written and directed by John Early, purely by association: when I asked a few friends Who is this guy and why is everyone so excited for his new movie? I was told that he was an improv comedian from the same school as Tim Robinson. Oh no. This was going to be yet another bust, after Robinson’s Friendship and Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie left me stone cold. Really, I felt like Jack Nicholson watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986. “That movie made me feel totally irrelevant to anything that any audience could want, and 119 years old… Believe me, everyone else watching it liked it. And you know, I literally walked out of there thinking my days are numbered. These people are trying to kill me.” It’s a lonely feeling sitting in a theater full of people laughing hysterically while you’re trying to figure out what went wrong, how could this have happened
Friendship and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie irritated me because I couldn’t recognize any of these people. How could people in their 30s and 40s make such timid and limp-wristed films? I took it as yet another indictment of the Millennial Generation, who’ve never left prepubescence and are terrified of their own shadows. Why? Well, who knows—your own shadow might call you racist, it might call you a bigot. And, my God, there’s really nothing worse than that. How can you live with yourself, knowing that other people called you names? Doesn’t it make you feel REALLY anxious? Kind of like there’s NO POINT in doing anything AT ALL because let’s face it climate change fascism capitalism etc. etc. etc. are destroying the Earth and there won’t even BE anything left in 30 years so why bother planning for it or making any effort at all to contribute to the world or ourselves and the people around us?
Maddie’s Secret is a welcome surprise, an eccentric movie with a unique comic sensibility and remarkable cinematography. For once, an American movie in the 2020s is as bold and expressive in its lighting as Gods like Fassbinder and Sirk. Early is clearly drawing from both for his not-all-mock melodrama, where he stars as Maddie, an overnight success in the food influencer world who endures a battle with bulimia. It’s a topical movie without ever being didactic or on the nose; it’s the kind of personal-social film that Fassbinder specialized in, albeit one with less to say about our country today than Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, The Third Generation, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul had to say about West Germany in the 1970s.
Maddie lives with Deena (Kate Berlant), an effusive lesbian juggling affairs with married women and her own potentially unhealthy attachment to Maddie. She’s along for the ride, encouraging Maddie to celebrate her success and ride the wave; ditto her doting husband Jake (Eric Rahill), who practically worships the ground she walks on. As soon as Maddie becomes famous, she starts fixating on backhanded compliments (“It’s so refreshing to see a healthy looking woman in the influencer space… You know, not scary thin!”) and develops bulimia. When Jake catches her purging, she comes up with a lie that Jake hangs on for the rest of the movie: “I’m pregnant!”
She’s not, but she’s dancing as fast as she can, and after impressing some foodie big shots, she collapses and goes into cardiac arrest. She’s admitted to an in-patient program, with bubbly roommate Julie (Vanessa Bayer, a mainstay on Saturday Night Live for most of the 2010s), and a trio of Manson-esque girls named Brittany, Connie, and Amanda (Ruby McCollister, Leah Hennessey, Emily Allan). What’s remarkable is that the entire cast of Maddie’s Secret appears tuned in on some frequency only they and Early can hear; there’s a unified aesthetic and a sensibility totally unique to Early (although not without precedent), something sorely missing from American movies today. The last time I saw an independent film bursting with ideas and made with this much verve was The Sweet East back in 2023. Max Lakner’s exceptional camerawork puts him among the top cinematographers in the country now, along with Hunter Zimny. You have to go abroad to find a similar level of personality and craft in recent films; the trio of Brittany, Connie, and Amanda reminded me the girls in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. The casting of Kristen Johnston as Maddie’s neglectful and spiteful mother is wonderful, a meta-textual choice in line with Patricia Hearst playing a crossing guard in Cry-Baby or the seedy and sadistic roles played by Karl-heinz Bohm in half a dozen Fassbinder films.
Maddie’s Secret is an invigorating film, one that proves that horror and lobotomized improv “comedy” aren’t the only moves to make for an independent filmmaker. It’s the work of a real filmmaker bursting with energy and ideas, not another comedian carving a cinematic notch for himself among specials, tours, and endless appearances that all amount to nothing; the movies are the only place to be.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM