This review may contain spoilers.
The first half is a straightforward movie about a woman finding internet success through an online cooking show. Some of it is a little charming, but the entire time I was struggling with the fact that Maddie is played by John Early, who also wrote and directed the movie. He does a good job, I guess, of looking female, but he is also clearly a man playing a woman. Because the movie is called Maddie's Secret, I naturally assumed that was the secret. I kept waiting for it to come up or for Maddie's husband to discover that the woman he married was biologically male. That never happens. The movie simply plays Maddie as a straightforward woman, without making gender identity or cross-dressing part of the character's story at all. That is certainly John Early's choice to make. It is his movie, so he is not really taking the role away from anyone. But I never understood why the choice was necessary. It draws attention to itself constantly while the movie refuses to acknowledge it. I spent most of the first half waiting for the film to address the most obvious thing happening on screen, only to realize it had no intention of doing so. Then the second half veers into some sort of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest redux. Maddie's actual secret turns out to be an eating disorder. Just as her internet cooking career begins taking off, she checks herself into a psychiatric facility, and the movie abandons most of what it had been doing to become a strange institutional drama about treatment, control, psychological trauma and recovery. It is such a sharp change in direction that it feels like an entirely different movie took over at the halfway point. That was actually a potentially good take. There is something interesting about borrowing the structure and imagery of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and applying it to a woman voluntarily entering treatment for an eating disorder. Unfortunately, the writing is not smart enough to do much with the idea. The movie gestures toward institutional cruelty and psychosexual trauma, but I never felt that it developed those ideas into anything coherent or especially insightful. That is the larger problem with Maddie's Secret. If John Early had been replaced by an actual woman and everything else remained exactly the same, I don't think anyone would find this movie particularly interesting on any level. It would come across as a mediocre B-movie about an internet cooking personality who develops an eating disorder and enters treatment. The fact that a man is playing Maddie in a completely straightforward way is what draws attention to the film, but the film itself insists that this choice has no meaning. The writing isn't particularly smart. The acting isn't particularly good. The filmmaking is competent, and a few scenes have some charm, but there just isn't much to it beyond the novelty of John Early playing the lead. The movie does not interrogate that novelty, explain it or even really use it. It is simply there. I know critics have been much kinder to this than I am, and perhaps they were more willing to accept the central conceit without questioning it. I couldn't. I kept wondering what the purpose of any of it was, and the movie never gave me an answer. I didn't hate Maddie's Secret. Mostly, I found it annoying. It presents something that seems deliberately provocative, refuses to address it, and then halfway through turns into an eating-disorder remake of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That description is considerably more interesting than the movie itself.