Early noir flourishes (low-angle shots of Rapace standing against a blue sky, her bandana whipping in the wind) artlessly surrender to a more generic style once Maja kidnaps her neighbor and turns her basement into her own personal Nuremberg. Maja is so determined to reinvent herself as a rosy-cheeked American housewife that not even her husband knows what happened to her during the war, and it often feels as if the movie around her shares its protagonist’s desire to be unremarkable. The most frustrating thing about “The Secrets We Keep” - the Israeli director’s second English-language film since 2013’s explosive “Bethlehem” made him a star back home - isn’t that it’s low-rent, but that it’s anonymous. It’s the intriguing conclusion to a much better movie, but here - tacked on to the end of a genre exercise that’s hardly suspenseful enough to sell the mystery of its basic premise, let alone leverage the “is he or isn’t he?” of it all into something richer - such heady abstractions don’t quite fit with the rest of the house. We do eventually learn the truth about the man who Maja and her all-American husband (a well-cast Chris Messina, master of playing clenched men who live their entire lives bracing for emasculation) have bound and gagged in their basement, but not before Adler and Ryan Covington’s threadbare script is able to insist that it doesn’t really matter that Maja’s past followed her across the Atlantic regardless of whether or not her neighbor played an awful role in it. ‘About My Father’ Review: Robert De Niro Is an Italian American Hero in Zippy Comedy And yet, the most effective stretches of “The Secrets We Keep” are the ones that seed a little doubt in Maja’s recollection, shake our confidence in a character whose convictions only grow more enflamed, and make us wonder if this sloppy piece of polite exploitation might actually be sophisticated enough to grapple with the consequences of its heroine getting things very wrong indeed. Aldo Raine wasn’t able to carve a swastika into all of their foreheads before they went into hiding. The perpetrators of the Holocaust scattered as far and wide as the diasporas they attempted to destroy, and Lt. The odds are slim - and memory is a murky body of water even before you filter it through the stuff of historical trauma - but such a twist of fate is hardly inconceivable. A listless, half-baked, vaguely Hitchcockian thriller about a Romani Holocaust survivor (a flushed Noomi Rapace) who’s trying to make a new life for herself in a Mayberry-like American suburb during the 1950s, Yuval Adler’s “ The Secrets We Keep” hinges on a single question that it struggles to ask with the weight it demands and/or answer with the grindhouse-like glee it encourages: Is the friendly-seeming family man whose accented voice she recognizes in town one afternoon ( Joel Kinnaman) actually one of the Nazi goons who executed her sister towards the end of the war?
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