![]() ![]() ![]() Rapace in particular is strong as a survivor who has been so driven past the point of no return (at least in her mind) that anything other than her version of the facts won’t satisfy her. That being said, the strength of the lead actors is so undeniable, it makes the material seem more thought-provoking than perhaps it deserves. ![]() Eventually, she involves Lewis, who reluctantly assists her but does not approve of the torturous methods she begins to employ to get a confession.Īt times, The Secrets We Keep feels a bit exploitative and b-movie in its execution. He swears on everything he can that he is Swedish not German and that he never fought in the war, but at this point Maja has gone too far to turn back. She eventually maneuvers into a situation where she kidnaps him and ties him up in her basement, interrogating him and hoping to get him to confess to his crimes. Before even seeing his face, Maja is convinced the man she saw peripherally is Karl, and she sets about following him until she sees him at home with his American wife (Amy Seimetz). One day while running errands, she hears a man whistle an unmistakable whistle and she catches a glimpse of someone (Joel Kinnaman) she once knew as Karl, a German soldier who, as the Nazis were pulling out of Romania, raped her and murdered her sister with the help of a few of his fellow soldiers. Now, on the brink of 1960, she lives in a small town in America and is married to an American, Lewis (Chris Messina), with whom she has a young son. The Secrets We Keep tells the story of Maja (Noomi Rapace), who was held in a prison in her native Romania with her younger sister 15 years before the present day of this story. The Secrets We Keep is available on 14 May on Sky Cinema and Now.The flawed but still compelling latest feature from director/co-writer Yuval Adler ( The Operative, Bethlehem) takes the somewhat familiar story (at least in movies) of a former Nazi soldier found in our midst and hiding under a new name here, he’s discovered by a woman he brutalized so badly that she will never forget his face. But the film keeps the coin spinning through the air for a surprisingly long time. It’s the same kind conceit as the Costa-Gavras film Music Box – one that keeps the audience wondering if someone is or isn’t a Nazi throughout – and it is in essence a 50/50 coin flip with only two possible outcomes. Messina and Kinnaman offer sturdy support and bring light and shade to their own roles just as well.Īll in all, it’s an engaging if pulpy drama. Rapace is particularly good at seeming mysterious, neurotic, vulnerable and terrifyingly focused all at once when all she’s actually doing is smoking a cigarette and standing there. It’s heavy thematic nudges like this which rather tarnish some of the subtlety built up elsewhere in the film, where director Yuval Adler and the cast have performed a narrative fan dance, revealing and obscuring bits of backstory and adopting inscrutable expressions that cast doubt on everyone’s motives and veracity. As she does so, the soundtrack plays a pastiche of the sort of suspenseful string music one might hear in an Alfred Hitchcock film from the period, like Vertigo or Rear Window or, as suggested by a cinema marquee Maja and the man happen to pass, North by Northwest. Maja is completely convinced this European, who says he’s a Swiss national named Thomas, is really a German named Carl who did unspeakable things towards the end of the war 15 years earlier.Īt first, she simply stalks him, wearing perfect little 50s sunglasses all the while. They all start to come out when Maja spots a tall blond man (Joel Kinnaman, in fact, and, like Rapace, originally from Sweden) with just the faintest German accent. But as the title rather suggests, there are secrets afoot quite a few in fact. Set in the late 1950s in a geographically vague American suburban town where fin-tailed cars roll sedately through the streets and women wear dresses shaped like great silent bells, local doctor Lewis (Chris Messina) and his Romanian-born wife Maja (Noomi Rapace) and their grade-school son Patrick (Jackson Dean Vincent) look like everyone else pursuing the American dream. ![]()
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