The Secrets We Keep: Post-War Thriller Entertaining Enough… If You Don’t Look Too Closely
By Kim Hughes
Rating: B-
Approached with a casual regard for logic, period thriller The Secrets We Keep is entertaining enough to recommend though it never feels quite as original or shocking as the filmmakers — working with a plainly Hitchcockian roadmap — likely hoped for.
When we first meet chain-smoking, perennially spooked-looking Maja (Noomi Rapace, who also co-produced), she is playing in a small park with her son. Just within earshot comes a whistle; a man is whistling for his dog. But that whistle is distinct, and it triggers something in Maja, who leaves her son to play alone as she follows the stranger to his car, hoping for a better look.
The stage is quickly set. Maja is a Romanian ex-pat living circa 1959 in a small American town with her benevolent doctor husband, whom she met overseas during the war. The couple work together in a clinic serving veterans and workers at the local refinery and while they scan as regular folk, there are hints of darkness beneath the surface.
This being a small town, Maja soon spots the whistling stranger again. As the film’s trailer reveals, Maja is certain this man is the Nazi who inflicted horrors upon her and others, despite, as her husband Lewis (Chris Messina) helpfully points out, “what’s the likelihood that the guy who attacked you halfway around the world 15 years ago ends up two blocks away.” Answer? Pretty likely.
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Or is it? Maja wastes no time kidnapping the stranger (again, revealed in the trailer) in a quest first to kill him, then to discover the truth about a terrible, terrible night during the war which was punctuated by a distinct whistle and which cost Maja her sister and much of her sanity but that she never mentioned to her doctor husband until the suspected Nazi was locked in the trunk of their car.
The whistling stranger, Thomas (Joel Kinnaman) insists he is Swiss, not German, that he is innocent and that, like Maja, he simply fell in love with an American and moved to start a new post-war life. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game first between Maja and Thomas (tied up in the basement) and then Thomas and Lewis as clueless neighbours and law enforcement circle impotently. Maja, meanwhile, forges a friendship with Thomas’ worried-sick spouse (Amy Seimetz) to gain more intel on her captive.
You could spend the entire running time of The Secrets We Keep unravelling its loose ends but nothing will quite add up and what would be the fun in that anyway? Director Yuval Adler is clearly aiming for a tense, edge-of-seat vibe and very often succeeds, especially as gosh-golly Lewis becomes more enmeshed in the plot.
Adler also neatly juxtaposes Maja’s tortured soul against the white-picket-fence backdrop of her adopted community in the 1950s, all hoop skirts and V8 gas-guzzlers. As for powerful commentary on Nazi atrocities or the perils of untreated PTSD, well, not so much.
The Secrets We Keep. Directed by Yuval Adler. Starring Noomi Rapace, Chris Messina, Amy Seimetz and Joel Kinnaman. Available digitally and on demand on October 16.