THE SECRET - The hidden truths: the review by Maria Vittoria Battaglia

When the memory fails to forget – a mind-boggling thriller

It arrived in Italian cinemas from 15 October, distributed by Vision Distribution and Cloud 9 Film, THE SECRET – The hidden truths, directed by Yuval Adler with Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman, Chris Messina, Amy Seimetz. Unfortunately, the new contrasting DCPM of COVID19 has interrupted its usability in the room.

A whistle.

Thus begins the story that Yuval Adler wants to tell us and we immediately find ourselves in the America of the 1960s, masterfully represented with pastel colors and soft and warm lights.

A whistle that immediately draws the attention of the protagonist, Maya (Noomi Rapace) e, along with his, ours too. From this moment the soft lights and pastel colors alternate with more intense lights and darker colors, in a vortex of emotions and in a continuous shift between present and past.

And it is the protagonists' relationship with their past that is the true subject of the film, which we could define as the redemptive story of a dramatic past.

Maya, a Zigeunerin – word with which the German soldiers called the Roma and that the protagonist often hears in her memories – who has lived a relatively peaceful life in America for fifteen years, is situated, at the sound of a man's whistle calling the dog, catapulted into the past, in the traumatic memories of the Nazi attacks in Romania during the Second World War.

Thanks to that whistle Maya recognizes, or so he believes, his attacker (Joel Kinnaman), thus deciding to follow him and finally kidnap him. But he doesn't seek revenge, but the memory of the lived experience, that – fragmented – fails to redial.

The hatred of the Nazi soldier gradually gives way to his feelings of guilt, convinced that at the time she ran away, abandoning her sister in the hands of her tormentors and condemning her, in tal modo, to certain death. Maya tries to remember, however it fails, and he must therefore reclaim his past in order to live in the present: for this he seeks not revenge but the confession of his executioner, for answers to the questions that torment her, to finally be able to silence their feelings of guilt.

In the course of the narration, the viewer is led to wonder, echoing the questions of Maya's husband, Lewis (Chris Messina), if you can't just forgive and move on. And if at first forgiveness seems possible, at the end, we are faced with the bitter answer: we are fragile in the face of the sufferings of life e, in this fragility, unable to forgive others e, mostly, unable to forgive ourselves. And so a film focused on trying to make peace with one's pain becomes a film about the difficulty of actually being able to redeem the past., and this is the constant that unites all the characters in the film, so different from each other but at the same time so incredibly similar.

The secrets we keep (original title) it is a film full of contradictions that thus manages to restore the complexity of emotions and human life, a sincere film that has the courage to say that if blinded by pain we will never be able to forgive; but it is also a film of possibilities, and when the director, through the voice of the protagonist, affirms that despite this fragility of the human condition “now we are here together and we will move forward together”, hope is restored to the viewer.

Maria Vittoria Battaglia

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