The Secrets She Keeps movie review (2021)

For a series that is being billed as a noirish thriller, it’s slightly frustrating that “The Secrets She Keeps” doesn’t really deviate from a certain narrative that is established in its first hour; it plays things relatively straight. Writers Sarah Walker and Jonathan Gavin, each of whom pens three episodes of the series, pack each installment full of plot, with the usual soapy elements like infidelity (shown through lips-parted, against-the-wall flashbacks) and murder. Directors Catherine Millar and Jen Leacey set a solid pace, building a slow-burn tension and sprinkling in moments of jarring surprise. There’s a dark humor running throughout that is consistently amusing: a man’s self-effacing laugh when his romantic partner asks, “How many other women are pregnant with your baby?”; Meghan’s mother, irritated with her influencer affections, asking of a fruit basket gift, “What am I meant to do with a pomegranate?”; an online shopping cart full of items that practically scream, “I am planning something felonious!”

But the greatest shortcoming of “The Secrets She Keeps,” which becomes clearer with each episode, is how the series fails to progress Agatha and Meghan forward in terms of interior development. Traumatic backstories abound, including a particularly unsettling one that nods toward how often we dismiss the pain of young women. The series does explore, to a limited degree, how motherhood acts as a unifier, instilling in women an immediate trust in others who also have children. Meghan and Agatha have barely had a couple of conversations when Meghan says of Agatha’s labor, “I want all the gory details,” an assumption of sharing that Agatha is all too eager to provide. Is this all that female friendship becomes after a certain age, the series wonders: bonding over children? “The Secrets She Keeps” dares to ask whether such a connection could be meaningless instead of meaningful, and there’s a refreshingly subversive quality to that query.

Yet there is an ultimate dissatisfaction to the series that is perhaps caused by its lack of reflection for what certain choices mean for these characters. The focus on cliffhangers and subterfuge means that Agatha and Meghan become defined by one secret each, and the series doesn’t expand their personalities much past that. De Gouw and Carmichael are solid performers—the former communicating ambition as a way to mask resentment, the latter balancing frailty and ferality—but the work they do on a scene-by-scene basis increasingly feels irrelevant given where the narrative needs these characters to go. This becomes most clear in the series finale, when one of the women realizes that she’s overlooked a significant element of her personal life. “I would have known. I would have sensed it,” she insists, and the desperate tenor of her claim makes an impact. By the end of the episode, though, there’s no further mention of this self-doubt, and no indication of how the character’s behavior will be shaped by or transcend past that uncertainty. “The Secrets She Keeps” is well-acted and tightly woven, but the broader points it aspires to make about maternal desire as social capital and motherhood as performance end up overshadowed.

Whole series screened for review. “The Secrets She Keeps” premieres on AMC on April 19.