Slice Review:
Maddie’s Secret , a film by John Early
By James Wyatt
Watched at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies
Sitting down for the encore screening of Maddie’s Secret at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies, I found myself wondering how the fuck John Early was going to pull this off. Especially in this damn town! *Cue Rachel Sennott’s come on, it’s L.A. soliloquy * (bravely penned in 2019, a full seven years before the Ozempidemic we’re currently living through.)
Maddie’s Secret is a melodrama-comedy about Maddie, a seemingly perfect girl whose life begins to splinter just as her influencer career starts gaining traction and the comments start rolling in. She’s trapped in a distinctly modern nightmare, one bloomed from old Hollywood ideals of womanhood and rerouted through YouTube, wellness speak, lifestyle branding and the low-grade psychic warfare of incel commenters.
As her bulimia tightens its two-finger hold, the film tracks the collapse of her otherwise placid, well-meaning instincts.
From the opening credits, which send Maddie gliding in slow motion through familiar L.A. North-Eastside pockets (while her wig remains impressively motionless), it’s clear Early didn’t arrive at this character out of nowhere. He plays Maddie with the poise of a mid-century melodrama star, but without sanding off the weirdness.
The miracle of Maddie’s Secret is that it can send up influencer psychosis, bulimia and L.A. womanhood without losing either the laugh or the sting. The film feels sharply tuned to a generation whose God’s strongest soldiers were glued to pro-ana accounts across platforms. *Cue Bon Iver’s Skinny Love over slow-fading images of Tumblr it-girls.*
As Maddie descends, Early builds a visual language that keeps the comedy alive even as the film moves into darker territory. Drenched in red light, Maddie becomes locked in the Jekyll-and-Hyde split of her own instincts, sweetness curdling into compulsion. The references are there: Showgirls, Marnie, Kate’s Secret. But the movie stays film-literate without becoming embalmed by its own taste.
The crowd I saw it with was eager to laugh, and they did, to the point of becoming a live laugh track for the first eighty percent of the movie. But in the back half, the melodrama began to crest and the room settled as Maddie moved further and further from her point of origin and into the consequences of her descent.
You never forget you’re watching a movie, and thankfully so. There’s a little something for everyone here: Eric Rahill shirtless (clear win for the gays), Maddie’s never-ending fusion recipes, and a supporting cast stacked with absolute
hitters, including Claudia Doherty, Conner O’Malley, Vanessa Bayer and, obviously, Kate Berlant.
Maddie’s Secret works because it’s objectively hilarious but, dare I say, moving. It knows how to turn taste, sickness, performance and internet damage into actual comedy without flattening any of it.
Please keep making shit like this!! I want a whole cinematic universe, franchise is so camp now. Move over MCU.
Published 4.24.26