“Maddie’s Secret” is probably not what you are expecting. Comedian John Early’s directorial debut, ostensibly a pastiche of basic-cable TV movies, is not a parody, or a satire, or even a comedy. Instead, it turns out a devastatingly sincere high melodrama with a studied queer sensibility.
Early plays the eponymous Maddie Ralph, a dishwasher at Gourmaybe, a food content production company. She’s sweet, hard-working, and a brilliant chef in her own right. Everyone in the film sees it; Her lesbian best friend (played by Kate Berlant) and her boyfriend (Eric Rahill of the magnificent “Rap World”) can’t help but dote on her, and who could blame them? One day, she finds herself the new face of Gourmaybe after one of her signature vegetarian recipes goes viral. But between the stress of her new job, a big opportunity to impress the executive producers of “The Boar” (not a typo) and the words of her mother banging around in her head, she regresses into bulimia. In attempting to hide her eating disorder, Maddie begins to unravel.
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There is no world, really, in which “Maddie’s Secret” would not have turned out very funny. If you were to make a list of the most exciting people in comedy from the past decade, everybody in the movie would be on it. The cast includes Kate Berlant, Vanessa Bayer, and Connor O’Malley. There is an all-time runner about Better Help, Maddie’s house is littered with incredible sight gags, and every time Berlant did so much as move her jaw it sent the whole theater to an uproar. Even when it is not strictly funny, the dialogue is written and perfomed with the kind of hyper-expressive broadness that defines the after-school specials which inspired it. But what is most immediately striking about the film is its straight-forward sincerity. Early never makes fun of Maddie, never lets the audience snicker at the screen. There is a mean version of this project, the one I imagined walking in — a satire of wellness culture and feminine self-image that is brutal and shocking, with a higher joke density. But “Maddie’s Secret” is a different and more tender thing.
The film has far more in common with “All That Heaven Allows” and “Showgirls” than it does with “They Came Together” or “The Naked Gun”; A shot of Maddie’s mother reflected in a television screen directly references Sirk’s classic. The film is gorgeous, with a color grade that reminded me of how Nicholas Ray movies looked on a CRT. It is camp in the true sense — the use of aesthetic hysteria and unreal dramaturgy in low-brow modes, all in the pursuit of greater honesty.
Though it is about many things, this is a movie most of all about bulimia, an epidemic that kills so many young girls and traps even more in a lifelong pattern of suffering. It treats eating disorders as a serious and crushingly universal experience. If the psychoanalytic rationale presented by the film can feel occasionally trite, it is no less astute or caring. By the time the story moves into the halls of an inpatient facility, it is strange to notice that “Maddie’s Secret” has, without any fundamental shift in tone, begun to feel ultra-real. Yes, it is funny to meet an adult woman at the hospital who decorates her room with posters of boys and talks too much. But it is also devastating, most of all because that is a real girl I have known. I can remember her name. Watching these women claw against institutional infantilization and a system of culturally instructed emotional regulation that is killing them broke my heart.
None of this would work without Early’s profound love for women. He plays Maddie with the grace of a mid-century diva. He wears that blond wig like it’s real hair, with untamed flyaways and a style that’s fighting its natural part. There is a sense, when Maddie visits a radically inclusive dance studio (even though she is just, in her words, an ally), that Early is welcoming in the girls from his past, giving them a space within his art. It respects the capability of melodrama to capture the intense despair and beauty of the soul. It cares about young women with eating disorders enough to believe they are worthy of such a massive canvas. It does not fetishize or leer at them, nor does it make them martyrs. The film’s climax, which finds Maddie confronting her mother about her childhood, is a genuine show-stopper, one that can only really work with the trust Early and co. have built up with the audience over the preceding hour and half. It is a film of real kindness.
It is rare, these days, to see something genuinely exciting on the indie scene. I am long desensitized to genre mashups and the unearned swagger of bad experimental cinematography. “Maddie’s Secret” renewed my hope that this corner of the industry can go to new places, outside of what is edgy or trendy. It is an extremely accomplished debut and one of the boldest American movies I have seen in years.
Grade: A-
“Maddie’s Secret” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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