![]() ![]() Director Oz Rodriguez brings much personality to the film, bringing the dying neighborhood to vivid life. the Bronx” is both a loving tribute to teen horror-the guys call the vampires “Suckhead!”-and a carefully constructed condemnation of gentrification. When they discover that the bloodsuckers plan on taking over the kids watch a “Blade” DVD to pick up vampire hunting tricks and rally the neighborhood to fight back. ![]() “Sleep with one eye open and don’t get got,” says live-streamer Gloria (Imani Lewis). When people begin to disappear, Miguel, the neighborhood’s beating heart and soul, realizes the obvious, that vampires have come north of 120th street. That’s always the first sign!” Among the newcomers are Frank (Shea Whigham), the tough guy whose throwing all the money around under the name Murnau Properties and Vivian (Sarah Gadon), a well-meaning newbie who always seems to be nearby whenever the kids are outside. Meanwhile, a new business is buying up all the local businesses, bringing with them gentrification and outsiders to the neighborhood. Jones III), three Bronx teens trying to arrange a block party to raise money to save their second home, a bodega operated by Tony (The Kid Mero), from being forced out by a rent hike. The story centers around Miguel (Jaden Michael), Luis (Gregory Diaz IV), and Bobby (Gerald W. That it also has a timely message is simply the icing on the cake, or in this case, the blood on the stake. the Bronx,” a “Goonies” style coming-of-age Halloween flick now playing on Netflix, is a throwback to the good old days when horror for kids had fun and an edge. Each performance fits in place, creating a mosaic of truths and lies that is as compelling as it is confounding. Messina brings the sense of his character’s confusion to life-You said we were going to do things together,” he says supportively, “and you torture him while I’m not here?”-while Kinnaman remains a cypher, a person who may or may not be the man Maja thinks he is. ![]() Rapace does her best work ever in an English film, bringing some nuance to a character who could have been played with a much harder, vengeful edge. The story isn’t particularly tricky, but it is carefully calibrated to make you wonder who is telling the truth, who is lying and even, who can trust their memories of long-ago events. How reliable is Maja’s memory? What amount of scepticism should Lewis bring to this situation? Is vengeance morally correct? Those questions and more hang heavy over the plot, confronting the viewer to assess their own feelings and biases. It’s a gritty, unsentimental movie that ratches up the tension with ideas, not action. “The Secrets We Keep” raises questions of trust, survivor’s guilt and the corrosive nature of secrets. She is tortured by the memory of what happened and why her sister was shot and she wasn’t. “I’m not the man you think I am,” Thomas (or whatever his name is) says, begging to be let go. Maja had never shared to the details of her ordeal with her husband, but he trusts her and goes along with plan to get a confession, one way or another. When Lewis gets home to find the man, who denies Maja’s charges and claims to be a Swiss citizen named Thomas (Joel Kinnaman, who, in real life went to high school with Rapace), tied up in the basement, he is rightfully perplexed. He is the SS officer who, near the end of the war, raped her and killed her sister as they fled a concentration camp.īlinded by anger and horrific memories she kidnaps him, hitting him in the head with a hammer and shoving him in the trunk of her car. Following him home she gets a good look and her worst fears are confirmed. One day at the park, she hears a man whistle for his dog and a flood of memories come back. Set in 1960, Rapace plays Maja, a Romanian refugee and Holocaust survivor, now living in a small American town with her physician husband Lewis (Chris Messina) and son Patrick (Jackson Vincent). “The Secrets We Keep,” a new revenge thriller starring Noomi Rapace and coming to digital and on-demand, is a riff on the claustrophobic revenge story of “Death and the Maiden.” ![]()
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