World War II and its aftermath have certainly been a subject of Hollywood storytelling for decades. The latest arrives in the form of The Secrets We Keep. It is one that is tragically moving and brilliantly addresses the haunting effects of war, long after the bullets cease to fly.
Noomi Rapace is Maja, a Romanian who survived the war, but not without deep psychological wounds that 15 years later are still raw. She met a doctor, Lewis (Chris Messina, Argo), in Europe working in a hospital after the battles ceased. They married and moved to an idyllic American suburb. The couple has a young boy, Patrick (Jackson Dean Vincent), who is the light of their life. The small-town doctor and his wife and child are pillars of the community and all that gets rocked when Maja is in the park one day with her son. A man whistles… a flashback to gypsies being hunted by Nazis ensues. She follows him but cannot get a good look. After that one moment, she is not the same. Her husband notices it but can’t put a finger on the source.
Maja becomes obsessed with this man, following him home one day to discover he has a wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz), a female toddler, and a baby boy. She learns that he goes by the name of Thomas (Joel Kinnaman) and works at the local refinery. One afternoon, she camps out at the refinery and is now certain. This is the man who was at the center of those German soldiers that raped and murdered many of Maja’s friends, as well as her sister. She pretends to have car trouble, asks for his help as he leaves work and promptly hits him in the head with a hammer, and puts him in the trunk of her car.
Her husband gets dragged into this entire situation when he’s informed about the former German SS soldier tied up in their basement. Now, he didn’t even know what she survived in the war, so this all is quite sudden and shocking. Maja never could bring herself to even tell him the story because it was so painful. Messina astounds at this point, going from an innocent, small-town doctor/doting husband who now is suddenly complicit in a kidnapping. The sway and its raw emotive reality are captured by the actor so subtly and brilliantly.
Rapace is a vision in commanding cinema. She is driven by something so dark and deep in her soul for any other actress, it could have been the supremist of challenges. But in the hands of Rapace, it is centered and commanding. Maja is a force of nature that’s been bottled up for a decade and a half and Kinnaman’s Thomas has the misfortune of being at the wrong end of her ire. Deservedly so? Perhaps, but there is no doubt in Rapace’s turn.
Kinnaman and Rapace know each other from coming up as actors in their native Sweden. They previously starred together in Child 44 and the roles have switched. She was the one tied to a chair being interrogated by him in that picture. It would be easy to say that these two thespians have a shorthand. But they don’t in this film, and that is an exceptionally good thing. The actor is distant, quiet, and confused. If he’s guilty, he’s selling innocence quite profoundly. Anytime a performer is limited by an aspect of the narrative—here being tied to a chair—they have to raid that actor’s toolbox because so much of their performance weaponry is cut off. Actors utilize their arms and legs, their entire body really. Witnessing Kinnaman, whose full-body stiffness was integral to his 2014 RoboCop.
The Secrets We Keep raises some fascinating moral dilemmas, as well as arriving merely months after the Justice Brett Kavanaugh he said/she said scandal during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Regardless of how you feel on the subject or who you believe, when you get down to it, in a situation like this, the only two people who know exactly what happened is one man and one woman. This sentiment is made more complex by the passage of time, the element of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and how psychologists have said that certain trauma-based memories can alter overtime when we become convinced it went down one way, when in fact it was another.
Throughout The Secrets We Keep, there is enough doubt raised by Kinnaman, his wife, and even Maja’s husband that one easily could believe that she’s confused, and it really was someone else. She never wavers. Not once. In the hands of an actress of Rapace’s stature, it is a fierce hurricane of a turn and because of that fact, don’t be surprised if you side with her as the story progresses. Even with reveals and answers to burning questions, the idea that your cinematic experience with director Yuval Adler’s latest effort will end in a nice little bow is elusive at best.
Whether it is the uncertainty about a person’s truth or our own innate skepticism, something happens with Adler’s film that is palpable. The script by Adler and Ryan Covington keeps the tension high with no result in this situation relieving any anxiety on the viewer’s part.
The extent to which human beings can be evil to each other was prevalent during the Second World War. Nothing about resolving issues or pain that arose out of those evil times will ever leave you feeling “good.” The entire world was forever scarred by WWII and that is what is the lasting effect of The Secrets We Keep. The film, fittingly, ends on American Independence Day and you’ll forgive us if you don’t really feel much like fireworks.
Grade: A-