"The Secrets We Keep" Star Noomi Rapace and Director Yuval Adler Discuss the Descent Into Madness
“We all have moments in our lives when something broke inside of us.”
THE SECRETS WE KEEP is a psychological thriller that stars Noomi Rapace as Maja, a wife and mother in post-WWII America who carries a deep secret. On the surface, she seems to have the picture-perfect life, living quietly in the suburbs with her family. All is well until she runs into the man who tortured and beat her years ago when she had been captured and detained in Nazi Germany.
Yuval Adler co-writes and directs this powerful revenge story of a broken woman who seeks vindication for the crimes committed against her, and both Adler and Rapace sat down with FilmSpeak to talk about the challenges in making the film.
A series of events lead to Maja ultimately kidnapping and holding her abuser hostage, much like he had done to her. As she relives the incidences in her head and struggles to remember everything clearly, she keeps him tied up in the basement of her family home and works with the help of her husband to maintain the image of their everyday life on the outside.
When the actor asked if she could relate to the idea of presenting yourself a certain way on the outside while experiencing a myriad of emotions on the inside, Rapace responded with a chuckle;
I mean… all the time, I would say… *laughs* You try to come across as a kind of normal person as you’re hiding all of your madness and your insanity, and then you meet someone else who is equally insane, like Yuval [Adler], when we first met—it was like two mad men meeting in New York! Then you kind of start a conspiracy, like, okay, let’s go into the madness and explore people who are on the edge, you know? So, for me, I felt with MY “basement”- Noomi’s basement, I gave Yuval the keys to my basement and he was looking into all of the madness and craziness and the brokenness and the sadness and the desperation and the anger. I invited him in, and it was okay because there is no judgement when someone has that same mentality.
Over the course of the quick-paced drama, which is interwoven with gruelling flashbacks from the Holocaust, Maja has to work to convince both her husband, Lewis (Chris Messina), and even herself, that what she says is true and that they are doing the right thing. This tug-a-rope creates not only tension between the two characters, but between Maja and the audience as they struggle to identify where the truth ends and the lies begin.
Adler says, “For me, the contradiction—the fact that you don’t know who to believe—is the key to the story. When Noomi approached me about getting on board and coming onto this project and re-writing it, it was not too long after the Ford v. Kavanaugh hearings . . . and it was so fascinating because you look at it and you can never go to the past and know what happened, right? There’s no other way than these two people playing it out and you making up your mind. And the fact that there’s no solution, really, that’s what was so fascinating about it. So, for me, it’s not about getting a solution to this kind of problem, but to enact it as much as possible in the film.”
Rapace helped to shape the story of the film by working in tandem with Yuval, and based much of her character’s backstory on similar experiences she had in her own life. She drew from her past and found an emotional basis for Maja as a woman who was ultimately just seeking closure.
“I think, we all have moments in our lives when something broke inside of us” Rapace adds. “For most of us, [it was] probably way smaller, but for those of us that had something really massive—a night, an event, a day—that really broke something massive in you. . . you revisit that moment and you know that it’s such an emotional place to be. It’s split, almost like a shattered mirror. When she closes her eyes, she just sees different reflections, but she can’t piece it together. So that in itself makes it impossible because she doesn’t know, and it doesn’t make sense. So, the further she gets, it’s almost like she’s falling apart because there’s no coming out of this. That is something that is so brutal with memories—that you don’t know. The more you try to find and grab at the truth and the answers, it’s like, what is it? Because you can have an emotional truth and then there is a factual truth. But what is truth? Who has the right to say that this is the lie and this is the truth?”
THE SECRETS WE KEEP is now playing in select theaters and drive-ins. Check out the trailer below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.