Maddie’s Secret Is a Brilliant Melodrama of Social Media Stardom

John Early’s mash-up of allusions and goofiness plays like a bold combination of Todd Haynes and David Wain.

The alt-comedy-to-auteur-pipeline keeps pumping away: Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, Bo Burnham, and now John Early. The 38-year-old stand-up and sketch-scene staple is familiar to millions for his handpicked cameo in Taylor Swift’s music video for “Antihero,” and is deeply beloved by fans of the pitch-black, premium-cable cult series Search Party, in which he played a callow, sociopathic influencer who faked lymphoma for clicks, among other things. “Oh my God, I would never lie about abuse,” says his character, Elliott Goss. “And I lied about cancer.” 

The perils of social media notoriety—and the dangers of dishonesty—also figure in Early’s feature directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, an homage-slash-send-up of 1980s TV movies set in the present. The film takes its cues (and its title) from Kate’s Secret, a corny 1986 NBC production starring Meredith Baxter as an aerobics instructor struggling with an eating disorder (the film was considered a landmark for portraying bulimia on prime time; “I didn’t know if I wanted to be the one throwing up on television” the actress told the Los Angeles Times on the eve of her premiere). Early’s eponymous heroine, Maddie, is a wannabe barefoot contessa whose Instagrammed kitchen vignettes unexpectedly go viral, transforming her pretty much overnight into a big-time (though reluctant) foodie-chic influencer.

The stress of keeping up appearances—and the specter of imposter syndrome—triggers Maddie’s long-submerged and potentially lethal bulimia: the secret she’s keeping unsafely at the risk of esophageal rupture or cardiac arrest. On the eve of a particularly important meeting with network executives on a restaurant-based reality show called The Boar (one vowel away from you know what), Maddie falls ill and gets checked into a hospital in-patient program. There, amid fraught group therapy sessions and dark nights of the soul, she’s forced to come to terms with her appetite for self-destruction.

On its surface, Maddie’s Secret doesn’t scan as a comedy. But its surfaces, all stilted line readings and redolently cheesy dramaturgy, are what’s funny about it. They belie but don’t blot out the essential empathy on display here; these ostensible alienation effects are really gestures of solidarity, offered by a filmmaker working outside the studio system (and getting away with an uncompromised vision as a result). Far from mocking his heroine’s plight, Early uses the camp strategy of placing everything on-screen in playful, flamboyant scare quotes—the characters, the situation, the dialogue—in order to speak a kind of humane truth about how certain physical and psychological........

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