OVERVIEW
Part homage to the cheesy made-for-television dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, part 1950s studio melodrama, John Early’s directorial debut stars the comedian as Maddie, a shy dishwasher whose life changes after a video of her cooking goes viral. Soon, she becomes a rising cooking influencer, with a loving husband and a growing audience, a dream life that looks perfect from the outside. Beneath that surface, though, Maddie is still haunted by childhood trauma, struggling with bulimia, and increasingly unsure of who she really is.
BACKGROUND
For those only familiar with John Early’s loud, narcissistic characters, seeing his debut feature, in which he plays the complete opposite, might come as a surprise. Having grown tired of those roles, he wrote Maddie’s Secret with the clear intention of playing an ingénue in the old Hollywood mold, choosing to play a woman as a way for audiences to give over to the film’s tonal extremes. After premiering as the opening-night selection of TIFF’s Discovery section in September 2025 to immediate raves, the film was acquired by Magnolia Pictures that October, reaching North American theaters the following summer.
THE REVIEW
Early’s love for the subgenre he is homaging is obvious from the very first scene, which shows Maddie running through the city early in the morning, scored by a synth that is artificial but easygoing. From there, the film covers many of those movies’ traits as if ticking off a checklist: the saturated colors, the melodramatic confrontations, the glossy production design once used to sell how ‘perfect’ these women’s lives were, all now turned absurd and played for the exaggeration.
That loyalty is both the appeal and the major issue. Viewers fond of those films will feel greeted and instantly hooked. Those unfamiliar, who in 2026 will be many, walk in with a lot of questions: why is Maddie played by a man, and is that supposed to mean anything inside the world of the film? Why do characters speak like that? I would have been confused too, had I not known the reference points going in. In the same way, several scenes and plot points feel present because Early wanted to pack in as many references as possible, not because they earn their place in this particular story.
It makes for a strange but fascinating experience. Even if you struggle to fully buy Maddie as a character, as I did, there is still a lot to like here, and most of it comes from the secondary characters. Maddie’s husband, her obsessed friend Deena (Kate Berlant), her boss, the women she meets in the clinic, and the staff who run it are all instantly memorable, and all perfectly cast. Early’s direction strikes a fantastic balance between exaggeration and seriousness, nowhere more than in the clinic scenes, where the comedy is constant but never gets in the way of a truly affecting storyline with Maddie’s roommate.
The script is sharp, and the jokes keep coming, parodying everything from the shallowness of influencer culture to modern prestige television (The Bear becomes The Boar), sometimes far more intelligently than it has any right to. That we still feel something for these people through all of this is a small miracle, and the only reason we don’t feel more is how much Early crams in. Childhood trauma, the eating disorder, the competition and misogyny of the workplace, Maddie’s hidden unhappiness, the whole rot of content culture, all of it fights for the same spotlight, and by the halfway point, the fighting starts to wear you down. There is a leaner, sharper film somewhere inside this one, and it keeps getting interrupted by the next thing Early wants to pay homage to.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Speaking as someone with little knowledge of what Maddie’s Secret is parodying, I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun I had with the film. Maddie’s casting was distracting and certainly got in the way, and I would argue the film would have worked better had it simply cast a woman without the asterisk. That, and the number of storylines, kept me from truly loving it, despite loving (and laughing at) so many of its individual ingredients.
- Where to watch
- Rent or buy at Apple TV Store
- Where to watch
- Out of Theaters
Play trailer
- Original title
- Maddie's Secret
- Director
- John Early
- Cast
- John Early, Kate Berlant, Eric Rahill, Kristen Johnston, Claudia O'Doherty, Conner O'Malley, Vanessa Bayer, Chris Bauer
- Rated
- NR
- Screenwriter
- John Early
- Composer
- Michael A. Hesslein
- Cinematography
- Max Lakner
- Editor
- Danny Scharar
- Country
- Language
- English