Maddie’s Secret (2025)

I have a half-formed theory, which I recently attempted to lay out to my beloved CDSOB co-editors hopped up on twice my daily allowance of coffee and two-and-a-half beers, that “actress” is a type of performance. A smarter person with more patience for research would lay out her argument here, starting perhaps with the fact that young men played the female characters in Shakespeare’s time, with much to follow about theater, a subject about which I know very little. She might then touch on what silent film asked of a face before talking about how Stanislavski and Strasberg's Method (starting on stage and eventually making its way onto our screens) led male actors to go big in a way that had previously been reserved for women whose work was, simultaneously, seen as outdated and theatrical. That kind of women’s acting was, unless in the hands of the right (often male) director, usually relegated to melodramas and “women’s pictures,” which eventually made their way to cable television for women. 

Maddie’s Secret, John Early’s directorial debut, draws directly from this well, not only in its subject matter, but in his performance as the title character. Early commits fully to Maddie Ralph and so does the rest of the cast. The film’s success hinges on this unblinking dedication to the bit. 

Maddie lives in a gorgeously lit home with her sweet video editor husband, Jake (Eric Rahill). She’s at the lowest level job at Gourmaybe, a food content startup, but dreams of a future in recipe development. Her best friend Deena’s encouragement is tinged with desire that Maddie is sweetly oblivious to, no matter how delightfully menacing Kate Berlant’s performance gets. In a scene of masterful sweater acting, Jake, fresh from the shower, shakes a finger at Maddie when she reaches for his towel, and instead lays his wife down for some fully clothed head. She’s beautiful, but she doesn’t know it. 

Maddie demurs from her husband’s camera when he films her making a sandwich inspired by her jog to work, but he convinces her to keep going and later on, to post the video. Though it’s against company policy, it does enough numbers that her disgusting boss, played perfectly by Conner O’Malley, signs her as on-camera talent the next day. 

Early has been transparent about pulling many of the beats of his screenplay (a triple threat! Quadruple if you count the dance class scenes) from the 1986 NBC made-for-TV movie Kate’s Secret starring Meredith Baxter as a housewife struggling with bulimia. As in most TV movies, Kate’s eating disorder is played for maximum drama, but wraps up neatly in two hours, give or take commercial breaks. Movies like this one played nonstop on Lifetime when I was growing up, a time in which, for the unsupervised, television chose you. 

Made-for-TV movies, daytime talk shows, even Unsolved Mysteries spent hours of airtime talking about the horrors of womanhood through cautionary tales with tidy endings. There are things in life that a woman must overcome: her own body and mind, her mother, the evils of men. What you have endured might earn you a makeover, a reunion, an opportunity to take accountability for your part in the demise of your marriage in front of an audience, or, if what happened was really bad, a softly lit interview through which you could be healed. 

As Maddie’s work at Gourmaybe picks up more traction, her body becomes as much the focus as her recipes. “It’s so nice to see a woman with a real body on camera.” Maddie’s issues with food start to rear their ugly head even before she is positioned against a thin, hip coworker who already hates her for the opportunity. Telling no one, she starts to binge again. 

The binges and purges in the film are its horror scenes: a woman moving silently in the dark in fear of being discovered. In one, Maddie is compelled to binge at home, even though she knows her husband is working in the other room. When Jake leaves his office to get a drink, she presses herself against the wall outside the kitchen, breathing heavily, more afraid of being found out than of the violence she’s inflicting on her own body. The shadows and tension hit exactly as they would if the knife-wielding killer were someone outside of herself. 

John Early has said that no one else was going to cast him as an ingenue, so he had to do it himself. It pays off. This isn’t parody; nothing in his performance strikes false within the world of the narrative. He is an actress in this film, embodying a woman who dreams of feeling comfortable in her body while denying as long as she can that she has a problem at all. 

Though it’s much more of an art house Lifetime movie than an actual horror film, Maddie’s Secret captures a very specific kind of feminine terror. A perfect film for those of us who learned our womanhood from television. 5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—Jaime Fountaine