“Maddie’s Secret” is probably not what you expect. Comedian John Early’s directorial debutApparently a pastiche of basic cable TV movies is not a parody or a satire or even a comedy. Instead, it turns out a devastatingly high melodrama with a studied queer sensitivity.
Early on, the named Maddie Ralph, a dishwasher on Gourmaybe, plays a food content production company. She is sweet, hard working and a brilliant chef in her own right. All in film Sees it; Her lesbian best friend (played by Kate Berlant) and her boyfriend (Eric Rahill from the magnificent “rap world”) can’t help but do on her, and who can blame them? One day she is the new face of Gourmaybe after one of her signature vegetarian recipes goes viral. But between the stress of her new job, a great opportunity to impress the executive producers of “The Boar” (not a writing error) and the words from her mother who turns around in her head, she regresses to bulimia. As she tries to hide her eating disorder, Maddie begins to loosen.
There is no world, where “Maddie’s Secret” would not have turned out to be very fun. If you were to make a list of the most exciting people in comedy from the last decade, everyone in the movie would be on it. The rollist includes Kate Berlant, Vanessa Bayer and Connor O’Malley. There is a runner all the time for better help, Maddie’s house is full of incredible views, and every time Berlant did so much as moving her jaw, it sent the whole theater to a rebellion. Even when it is not strictly fun, the dialogue is written and perfomed with the type of hyper -expression breadth that defines special offers after school that inspired it. But what is most immediately striking about the film is its straightforward sincerity. Early on, Narr of Maddie never lets the audience jokes on the screen. There is an average version of this project, the one I imagined to go in-one satire of wellness culture and feminine self-image that is brutal and shocking, with a higher joke density. But “Maddie’s Secret” is another and more sore thing.
The movie has much more in common with “all the sky allows” and “showgirls” than it does with “they came together” or “The naked gun”; A shot of Maddie’s mother reflected in a TV screen directly refers to Sirk’s classic. The movie is wonderful, with a color class that reminded me of what Nicholas Ray movies looked like on a CRT. It is camps in the real meaning use of aesthetic hysteria and irreplaceable dramaturgy in low-edge situations, all in the pursuit of greater honesty.
Although it is about many things, this is a movie most of bulimia, an epidemic that kills so many young girls and traps even more in a lifelong pattern of suffering. It treats eating disorders as a serious and crushing universal experience. If the psychoanalytic reasons presented by the film can sometimes feel trite, it is no less sharp or caring. When the story moves into the halls in an inpatient facility, it is strange to notice that “Maddie’s Secret” has, without any basic tone shift, begun to feel ultraled. Yes, it is fun to meet an adult woman at the hospital who decorates her room with posters of boys and talks too much. But it is also devastating, most of all because it is a real girl that I have known. I can remember her name. Looking at these women chlorine against institutional infantilization and a system of culturally instructed emotional rules that kill them broke my heart.
None of this would work without Early’s deep love for women. He plays Maddie with mercy in a diva from the middle of the century. He wears the blonde wig that is real hair, with undisturbed Flyaways and a style that fights against its natural part. There is a feeling when Maddie visits a radically inclusive dance studio (although she is fair, in her words, an ally), which is early welcoming in the girls from his past, giving them a space in his art. It respects melodrama’s ability to capture the intense despair and beauty of the soul. It cares about young women with eating disorders enough to believe that they are worth such a massive canvas. It does not fetish or smiles on them, nor do them martyrs. The film’s climax, which finds that Maddie confronts her mother about her childhood, is a genuine show-stopper, one that can only really work with a trust early and co. Have built up with the audience for the previous and a half hour. It is a movie of real kindness.
It is rare these days to see something really exciting on the indie scene. For a long time I am desensitized to genre mashups and the unprocessed oscillation of poor experimental film. “Maddie’s Secret” renewed my hope that this corner of the industry can go to new places, outside what is wild or trendy. It is an extremely implemented debut and one of the boldest American films I’ve seen in several years.
Rating: A-
“Maddie’s Secret” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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