The alt-comedy-to-auteur-pipeline keeps pumping away: Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, Bo Burnham, and now John Early. The 38-year-old stand-up and sketch-scene staple is familiar to millions for his handpicked cameo in Taylor Swift’s music video for “Antihero,” and is deeply beloved by fans of the pitch-black, premium-cable cult series Search Party, in which he played a callow, sociopathic influencer who faked lymphoma for clicks, among other things. “Oh my God, I would never lie about abuse,” says his character, Elliott Goss. “And I lied about cancer.”
The perils of social media notoriety—and the dangers of dishonesty—also figure in Early’s feature directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, an homage-slash-send-up of 1980s TV movies set in the present. The film takes its cues (and its title) from Kate’s Secret, a corny 1986 NBC production starring Meredith Baxter as an aerobics instructor struggling with an eating disorder (the film was considered a landmark for portraying bulimia on prime time; “I didn’t know if I wanted to be the one throwing up on television” the actress told the Los Angeles Times on the eve of her premiere). Early’s eponymous heroine, Maddie, is a wannabe barefoot contessa whose Instagrammed kitchen vignettes unexpectedly go viral, transforming her pretty much overnight into a big-time (though reluctant) foodie-chic influencer.
The stress of keeping up appearances—and the specter of imposter syndrome—triggers Maddie’s long-submerged and potentially lethal bulimia: the secret she’s keeping unsafely at the risk of esophageal rupture or cardiac arrest. On the eve of a particularly important meeting with network executives on a restaurant-based reality show called The Boar (one vowel away from you know what), Maddie falls ill and gets checked into a hospital in-patient program. There, amid fraught group therapy sessions and dark nights of the soul, she’s forced to come to terms with her appetite for self-destruction.
On its surface, Maddie’s Secret doesn’t scan as a comedy. But its surfaces, all stilted line readings and redolently cheesy dramaturgy, are what’s funny about it. They belie but don’t blot out the essential empathy on display here; these ostensible alienation effects are really gestures of solidarity, offered by a filmmaker working outside the studio system (and getting away with an uncompromised vision as a result). Far from mocking his heroine’s plight, Early uses the camp strategy of placing everything on-screen in playful, flamboyant scare quotes—the characters, the situation, the dialogue—in order to speak a kind of humane truth about how certain physical and psychological frailties get packaged within pop culture. The sheer artificiality of Maddie’s Secret is the realest thing about it.
The first time we see Maddie—played by Early wearing a blonde wig and prosthetic breasts—she’s bouncing her way through sunny Los Feliz to what sounds like a synth-thetic cover of Hot Fudge’s “You Keep Me Hanging On.” The risks here are real, and they’re spectacular; like much else in Maddie’s Secret, Early’s performance—all fluttering eyelids, wan smiles, deep-chested breaths and a mild vocal fry seemingly derived from the Aaron Spelling Televisual Universe—is suspended between deadpan rigor and earnest expressivity. To paraphrase Sontag on camp, Maddie is very much “a woman” in quotes, but she’s also an intrepid, endearing, and desirable heroine whose talent is emphasized alongside her decency, and whose pain is never played for laughs. Early’s decision to cast himself—inspired by the legendary drag queen Harris Glenn Milstead—feels like an unveiling of aspirations and influences from the bad-taste extravaganzas of John Waters to Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls to the postmodern brinkmanship of Todd Haynes, whose shadow falls over Maddie’s Secret and then some.
Todd Haynes’s controversial 16 mm short Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) used a series of strategically carved Barbie dolls to dramatize the singer’s battles with anorexia. The film’s miniaturized melodrama style invited pearl clutching while winning critical plaudits. Haynes was inveighing against the kind of prime-time docudrama dreck that sought to reduce artists and celebrities to their afflictions. Maddie’s Secret isn’t as stark or as confrontational as Superstar, but it’s obviously a spiritual descendant of sorts, adopting a hyper-specific form for the express purpose of demolishing it. Early’s mash-up of allusions and straight-up see-what-sticks goofiness is novel, like a bold combination of Haynes (whose critically acclaimed movies are often very funny) and the deadpan alt-comedy pastiche master David Wain, venerated by creators of Early’s generation for superbly skewering glossy, popular genres like summer-camp sex farces or big-city rom-coms. (A corny portmanteau for those in the know: Wet Hot May December.) But Early isn’t simply cracking in-jokes; instead, he’s inviting fellow campers and normies alike to revel on his particular, slippery wavelength.
“I swear to God, Maddie, it’s like you’re out of some modern-day fairy tale,” says Deena (Kate Berlant) to her work bestie as they clock in for dishwashing shifts at the premium cooking brand GourMaybe. The avidity of the line reading is amusing in and of itself while establishing the very real—and inherently perilous—happily-ever-after stakes of the narrative to come. Like most princesses, Maddie is a bit oblivious: She can’t tell, for instance, that Deena regards her as her own personal thirst trap, an infatuation that manifests in increasingly aggro-platonic postures. The more that butch lesbian Deena brags about her other sexual conquests, the clearer it is she wants to stick her tongue down her hetero pal’s throat—a shameless genre cliché that Early and Berlant take giddy pleasure in pushing to the breaking point. The pair have been working together for more than a decade now in shorts and sketches, and their chemistry is positively pharmaceutical; Berlant, who’s got a touch of wild genius, weaponizes her lanky limbs and angular jawline every time she walks into frame, as if Deena were trying to puncture the invisible bubble of the friend zone with her body.
Deena is transparently jealous of Maddie’s sweetly and sweatily ursine husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), the main beneficiary of his love’s off-the-clock cooking talents. “Did you throw away the mango pickle from the Indian we ordered?” Maggie asks after sashaying home, one of many delectable lines that turn the low-hanging fruit of TV-movie dialogue into gourmet fare. Another one, after Jake gently suggests uploading footage of Maddie’s culinary skills to the cloud: “I just wanted to make my husband some dinner, and now I’m in postproduction.”
Maddie won’t cook or eat meat, because of a childhood trauma around food and body image. “The camera adds ten pounds,” chides Maddie’s mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnson), when her daughter calls her to talk about the possibility of her becoming a brand ambassador for her company—a “Gourmaybe Girl.” Early’s stricken reaction shot on the other end of the phone—blue-hued in the moonlight, and held for an extra beat beneath a tinkling piano score—perches firmly at the precipice of winking excess without tipping over. Every aspect of the film exhibits this level of discipline, from the writing and directing and acting to the mise-en-scène; the wonderfully stylized cinematography is by Max Lakner, who keeps floridly color-coding the characters’ psychological states. We get blood reds and deeper purples; enveloping shadows and ring-light halos; ghostly window reflections and heart-to-hearts. The food that Maddie prepares looks variously appetizing and ersatz depending on whether we’re in her home kitchen or at the fluorescent Gourmaybe offices. There are plenty of less stridently artificial movies that could benefit from a small fraction of such expressivity.
As the plot develops, Early includes all kinds of superfluous shtick, like interludes in a queer-dance group that are basically an excuse for cast frolicking on the clock. Still, he keeps an admirably tight handle on the various character dynamics, including Jake’s yearning to become a father, a plan held in check by Maddie’s mommy issues. Crucially, Early refuses to trivialize Maddie’s recovery in the hospital scenes, even as he populates the ward with killer supporting performers like Vanessa Bayer and Leah Hennessey. Sad moments are played straight, despite the absurdist flourishes around them, as when another patient, Connie (Hennessey), eulogizes a fellow patient who didn’t make it: “Your existence was inconvenient to me because you were the living embodiment of the parts of myself I’ve tried to obliterate.” Simple tear-jerking is easy, but the articulation of genuine angst—especially in this context—takes real sensitivity and nerve. For anyone who might still be disoriented by the way Maddie’s Secret plays with tone, the eulogy sequence wipes the smirk off the movie’s face—or their own—once and for all.
Early’s softheartedness is winning, but he’s hardly edgeless. Besides working through his nostalgic ambivalence for the shock tactics of Kate’s Secret and its ilk, he’s taking aim at the lifestyle-brand fakery of GourMaybe and its craven head honcho, Zach (Connor O’Malley), who addresses his staff megalomaniacally, like a true believer. “Play nice, we’ve got content to make,” he bellows, with O’Malley torquing his delivery as if he knows the line is destined for future screencap-meme status. It’s telling that a comedian like Early, who developed his skills and following in an extremely online setting, would cast the internet in such ambivalent terms; crucially, Maddie’s catharsis bypasses the zone of public performance altogether.
The question of whether Maddie will get another chance to be famous for her cooking is one of several loose ends that Early leaves conspicuously dangling; others include the fate of her marriage to Jake (Rahill is given plenty of directorial leeway in a part with more bruised dignity than expected) and Deena’s mental health (Berlant is intrepid enough to survive being the only member of the cast treated in the end like a cartoon character; the movie loses a bit of spark when she’s sidelined in the home stretch).
The abruptness of Maddie’s Secret’s ending is in sync with its TV-movie inspirations, but it also underlines Early’s desire to create something stranger and more bracing than expected; to swap out a benign, crowd-pleasing sort of cognitive dissonance for a sometimes disorienting ambiguity. Maddie doesn’t hold onto all of her secrets—she can’t—but she’s still finally a woman of mystery. The highest compliment that Early can be paid is that even when the movie ends, Maddie seems to exist beyond the final (freeze) frame.
