Cultural Mining

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

School’s out for summer and I am away, but I recorded this a week in advance so you can still keep up with what’s playing now. So this week, I’m looking at three movies about secrets, mysteries and fantasies. There’s a food influencer with a hidden secret, a furniture salesman with a mystery behind his walls; and a secretary at a police station turned amateur sleuth.

Maddie’s Secret

Wri / Dir: John Early

Maddie (John Early) is a young woman who works at a food show studio.  She has long blonde hair an a flawless complexion.  She works washing dishes in the studio kitchen along side her best friend Deena (Kate Berlant). Deena doesn’t hide her crush, but Maddie is steadfastly heterosexual and happily married to her burly husband Jake (Eric Rahili). The feelings are mutual, and he is quick to tell her she’s perfect in every way. Maddie, a vegetarian, loves everything to do with food, and is quick to try new recipes and hacks.

But when, just for fun, they record her cooking a new dish and put it online, it goes viral, overnight. Suddenly she’s a much-in-demand food influencer.  So to deal with the new stress, Deena signs her up for dancercise lessons, in an all-queer gym. But despite the fame, and the dance classes, she finds herself regressing to her closely-held secret. Back in her teenage years, when her oppressive mother (Kristen Johnston) was so demanding, she was driven to bulimia! Girge and purge, gorge and purge. And now it’s all coming back again. Can Maddie overcome her eating disorder? Or will it lead to ruin and death?

Maddie’s Secret is a brilliant, retro satire in the style of movies of the week and after school specials of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Though updated to the present day, it’s filled with huge emotional struggles, psychological breakdowns, jealousy and denial. It is drop-dead hilarious, and the reason it works so well, is it’s all done deadpan. Just to be clear, writer/ director/star John Early who plays Maddie, is not doing drag, rather, he’s playing a very sympathetic, female role.  That’s why it works so well. The other characters are also hilarious, especially scenes set in a mental hospital (that she’s trying to escape from), in the style of Girl, Interrupted. 

Brilliant movie.

Backrooms

Co-Wri/Dir:  Kane Parsons

It’s a strip mall somewhere in the US. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is an architect but works as the owner/manager of a chintzy furniture store. Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire is huge and bleak, lit by fluorescent lights, and prone to power outages. He does his own excruciating TV commercials dressed as a peg-leg pirate. He has two bored employees,  Bobby and Kat (Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell) who lounge around all day — cause there are no customers. And Clarke is regularly seeing his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), to deal with his anxiety about work and marital problems. His wife kicked him out of their hime so he sleeps in the store, instead.

But he is disturbed by the strange sounds and light coming from the store’s basement. And after much trial and error, he discovers a hidden door to another room down there. And there’s not just one backroom, there’s a whole undiscovered world down there, both creepy and mundane, with recorded voices, strange passageways, and video cameras. It’s like a parallel universe that duplicates and reduplicates rooms we’ve already been to, only just a bit different. He reports this all to Mary, Bobby and Kat, but everyone thinks he’s a bit crazy. But the deeper he goes, the stranger things get. Is he imagining all this? Is there a logical solution to these backrooms? And are we seeing Clarke’s backrooms… or someone else’s?

Backrooms is a dream-like fantasy/horror movie about memory, perception and the human brain. I’m intentionally telling you very little about the movie itself, because part of its appeal is experiencing things that are revealed. The film is a mammoth hit, mainly because it’s entirely new and original. It’s based on a short film the director made in 2022 when he was still a teenager. (He’s 21, now.) It partly feels like a satire of endless AI slop, but there’s more to it than that. 

Backrooms is absurd, fantastical and surreal; it’s a must-see.

Unidentified

Co-Wri/Dir: Haifaa al Mansour (Wadjda, Mary Shelley)

Noelle (Mila Al Zahrani) is a young woman living alone in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Her marriage fell apart after her husband sought a second wife following the death of their newborn in childbirth. Now she works in a police station, scanning files for digitalization. It’s a calm neighbourhood with mainly petty crime. And in her spare time she loves watching a podcaster who applies makeup while analyzing true crime mysteries. Noelle often discusses these cases with her boss, a friendly police chief (Shafi Al Harthi). Though Noelle is gentle and compassionate, he jokingly calls her “the executioner” because she’s in favour of capital punishment when serious crimes occur. For one such crime he drives her out into the desert, where a young woman’s dead body has been discovered. But not identified; she has no ID, or distinguishing fingerprints or marks.

The case is given to a detective, but Noelle wants to first identify the teenaged girl — so she is not buried in an unmarked grave — and to catch the killer. So she turns to sleuthing on her own, visiting girls’ high schools around the city, talking to students, and looking for the perpetrator. She also tracks down a young man who uses day-glo paint to post stencilled signs with quotes of the Koran. Is he somehow related to the killing?

But as she uncovers more and more clues, powerful families — and even police — try to stop her from uncovering the truth. She’s a nobody, not even a policewoman — what does she know? And she keeps making trouble. Can Noelle catch the killer and identify the victim?

Unidentified is a pretty good mystery set in an unusual locale: in and around the westernized city of Riyadh. I’ve never seen a Saudi policier, especially not with a woman as the wanna-be detective. Mila Al Zahrani is terrific as Noelle, and I like the unfolding story but I had a bit of trouble — logically speaking — about an unexpected twist near the end (No spoilers). Haifaa al Mansour is a really good director — she did movies like Wadjda,  that was also one of the first worthwhile movies to come out of modern Saudi Arabia. That’s why I wanted to see this one;  plus I’m always up for a good police procedural. While flawed, I’d gladly watch all these characters again, in another mystery.

Backrooms and Maddie’s Secret are now playing and Unidentified opens this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings. 

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website  culturalmining.com