![]() It doesn’t help that “Secrets” shares one of the main flaws of Roman Polanski’s screen version of “Death and the Maiden” in both cases, the director has cast actresses with an action background, presumably to make sure they could handle the intense physicality of the role, but both actresses have created such indelible heroes - “Death and the Maiden” star Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley and Rapace’s Lisabeth Salander - that it’s hard for audiences to doubt the character’s sanity. But neither of these threads leads anywhere particularly interesting. “The Secrets We Keep” takes a stab at some new plot ideas in explaining to Lewis what’s happening, Maja reveals to him for the first time her Roma background, and Maja investigates the man’s past by befriending his distraught wife (Amy Seimetz) under the guise of being neighborly. So convinced, in fact, that she kidnaps him and - after failing to summon the nerve to shoot him and bury him in a shallow grave - she brings him to her basement to torture him and to force him to admit his crimes, even though he insists he’s innocent and that he sat out the war in Switzerland.Īlso Read: Noomi Rapace to Star in Claustrophobic Thriller 'O2' From Producer Alexandre Aja After following the man (Joel Kinnaman) home, she becomes convinced that he is the Nazi officer who raped her and murdered her sister during the war. While in the park with her son one day, she hears a man whistle for his dog, and she feels that whistle in her spine. (She resembles an amalgam of various Helena Bonham-Carter characters in the Tim Burton universe.) Rather than present Maja as a paragon of Better Homes and Garden living who snaps, Rapace makes her dark and brooding from the get-go, constantly smoking and peering out at the world behind sunglasses. Noomi Rapace stars as Maja, trying her best to live the American Dream as a mother of a young son and wife to Lewis (Chris Messina), whom she married in Europe when he served with the medical corps in 1946, after the end of fighting. Do Adler and Covington achieve that potential? Not in the slightest.Īlso Read: Noomi Rapace's 'The Secrets We Keep' Acquired by Bleecker Street Is there potential in changing the setting of “Death and the Maiden” from an unnamed Latin American country to the USA of the 1950s, still reeling in various ways from World War II? Absolutely. What grates about director Yuval Adler and his co-writer Ryan Covington pilfering so obviously from Dorfman’s work is that they haven’t done anything particularly interesting with it. The history of art is the history of creators borrowing from each other, whether they call it homage or reference or appropriation. ![]() The worst sin of “The Secrets We Keep” is not that it so blatantly and flagrantly rips off Ariel Dorfman’s play and subsequent movie “Death and the Maiden” - although if the Chilean author wanted to sue for a credit, he’s certainly got a case.
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