Mark Reviews Movies: THE SECRETS WE KEEP

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 15, 2020

It's the whistle that catches the attention of Maja (Noomi Rapace). It rings through the air of the little town where she now lives, and as the sound repeats and the sight of the man producing it gets closer, the whistle seems to pierce through something inside Maja. She has heard that particular sound before. She is convinced she has heard the voice of man, calling to a dog in a German accent. She might have seen his face, too, but it's difficult to tell. The back and side of the man's head is all Maja can see.

The thought—that this man is familiar—quickly becomes an obsession in The Secrets We Keep. The obsession—that Maja must know the truth—gradually becomes thornier as the story unfolds. If her memory—that this man is the same one who destroyed her life—is incorrect, she may have ruined her own attempt to keep up a normal life. If the memory is accurate, though, what action will she and must she take, and what will be the consequences of that?

Co-writer/director Yuval Adler is concerned with consequences here, and they're a bit deeper than whether or not Maja's memory is accurate and what she will do if that recollection is correct. The story, in which Maja abducts the man and keeps him tied up in the basement of her family home while she attempt to determine the man's identity, is a thriller of sorts about lies, the truth, and the murky shadows of traumatic memories.

Maja has some secrets of her own—secrets that she has kept from her husband Lewis (Chris Messina), a doctor, for 15 years. They met in Greece at a medical unit shortly after the war on the continent ended. He knows Maja suffered some kind of trauma. She has been having nightmares as long as Lewis has known her, but psychiatric treatment has alleviated the worst of it. Now, the two have started happy family, raising a young son in small-town bliss.

The whistle, though, brings back everything. Maja begins following the man, a neighbor (played by Joel Kinnaman) who lives about two blocks from her home. He's a newcomer in town, a European immigrant with a wife (played by Amy Seimetz) and two children, who has started working at the local oil refinery.

One day, Maja waits for the man outside his work and attacks him. Her initial plan is to kill him and bury his body, but the neighbor's cries stop her finger from pulling the trigger. Instead, she brings him home and, after their son has gone to bed, reveals what she has done to Lewis.

The basics are thus: Maja was a member of the Romani people, who survived imprisonment in a concentration camp with her sister, only to be ambushed by Nazi soldiers fleeing from the advancing Soviets. A massacre followed, but Maja somehow lived. Her memory of the horror is foggy.

Even so, she is convinced that this man was one of the soldiers. The neighbor insists he's Swiss and was nowhere near combat.

Superficially, this is a revenge tale, in which the central dramatic question is which of the two is correct about the information each is presenting. The filmmakers frame it in a slightly different way, though. Maja's primary motive doesn't appear to be vengeance. Indeed, she promises the captive neighbor that she will release him, to go elsewhere with his family and let her live with some peace, if he tells the truth of which she is so certain. The goal here, as we gradually learn, isn't to kill this man for his wrongdoing, but for Maja to have the truth of her trauma confirmed—and to learn if she left her sister to die in order to save her own life.

There's a terrible, painful sadness beneath this. Almost all of it is communicated in Rapace's performance as the conflicted Maja, though, because Adler and co-screenwriter Ryan Covington are primarily concerned with the twisted narrative of the past, which unfolds in elliptical flashbacks and the neighbor's constant denials—even under the threat and suffering of torture. Lewis' role here is as a moderator of sorts, trying to obtain concrete evidence from the neighbor and to determine if his wife has somehow suffered a breakdown.

The character, while serving as a moral arbiter, kind of gets in the way, as do a few scenes of close calls (including one featuring a most ineffectual cop). The most effective scenes are between the two wives, Maja and the woman the neighbor married, as the captor is forced to confront her potential similarities to her captive and the life, filled with people who rely on him, he has made for himself.

In the end, though, the story is all about the truth and what is to be done about it. In its rush to arrive at that conclusion (There's a distracting jump in time between the truth being revealed off-screen and the climax), the screenplay loses sight of the trickier moral and tangible consequences of what might be or must be done. The Secrets We Keep seems to evolve into a story about facing the realities and questions of vengeance, but ultimately, the story is nowhere as complex or tricky as it appears.

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