‘The Secrets We Keep’: Yuval Adler Talks Kidnapping (Potential) Nazis And The “Badass” Noomi Rapace

The power of human memory is put to the ultimate test in The Secrets We Keep, the latest feature from Israeli filmmaker Yuval Adler (Bethlehem, The Operative).

Set in the late 1950s, the film kicks things off by painting an idyllic picture we’ve all come to associate with the mid-century decade: kids frolic in the local park, the hardware store owner knows your name (Can’t pay for something? Not worry, it’ll go on your tab!), and the town movie theater’s marquee advertises Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. It’s a picturesque and comforting slice of Americana that’s abruptly shattered by the arrival of a possible monster.

While at the park with her son, housewife Maja (Prometheus’ Noomi Rapace) hears a distinctive whistle that transports her back to the end of World War II when she was raped by a group of German soldiers. All at once, her traumatizing past as a persecuted Romani in Europe comes back to haunt her. Maja traces the whistle back to Thomas (The Suicide Squad’s Joel Kinnaman), a nondescript newcomer to town. He’s the embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”…if he’s actually a Nazi, that is.

So sure that he is the man who assaulted her all those years ago, Maja forcibly kidnaps Thomas and ties him up in her basement. As a result, her skeptical husband Lewis (Bird of Prey’s Chris Messina) — a physician who never saw combat during the war — is roped into the bizarre hostage situation that gets more unbelievable by the minute.

Together, Maja and Lewis (seeing his wife in a new light for the first time) shed their quiet suburban existence to become amateur war crimes investigators, trying to verify Thomas’ identity through Swiss contacts and even the man’s distraught wife, Rachel (Pet Sematary’s Amy Seimetz). The scheming couple also has to hide their unwilling house guest from nosy neighbors, investigating police officers, and their young son.

If Thomas is who Maja thinks he is, than his mere presence in the house brings a new dimension to that old childhood fear of a terrifying creature lurking in the dark, damp basement. Until the very end, however, we’re left wondering whether Kinnaman is an actual Nazi fugitive or just the unfortunate victim of mistaken identity and faulty recollection. Ah, ah, ah — no spoilers. You’ll just have to check out the film for yourself.

What you end up with is a well-executed period thriller that rolls Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden, Orson Welles’ The Stranger, and Stephen King’s Apt Pupil into one taught, and oftentimes claustrophobic, package. With its tight-knit cast (there are only four main characters) and limited setting, The Secrets We Keep feels more like an intimate stage production than it does a movie. Those things end up working in favor of the story, whose smaller scale organically weaves together suspense and pathos.

In other words, it’s a must-see for anyone eagerly awaiting Season 2 of Hunters.

Ahead of the film’s limited theatrical rollout this coming Wednesday (Sep. 16), I caught up with Adler — who shares screenplay credit with Ryan Covington — to learn more about the movie’s *ahem* secrets…

^{***WARNING! The following may contain mild spoilers for the film!***}

Josh Weiss: Where did the idea for this movie come from?

Yuval Adler: I came on [board] when there was already an original script. Noomi and Joel were attached, and Noomi really wanted me to direct the film. She saw Bethlehem, my previous film, and she just started calling me about this and we met in New York. Then the original script needed a lot of work and we were in synch about what the script needed … The schedule was very tight, but Noomi is such a force of nature, that when she wants you to do something, you basically have no choice. She stalks you until you do what she says and then you do it.

JW: The film is almost like a stage play with its limited cast and locations. Was that always the plan?

YA: No, the story itself calls for it. We didn’t have a big budget and you don’t want to waste money on stuff that’s outside the story of the main characters, who are having this huge melodrama going on in their lives. You just want to stay with them. It just happened naturally. I’m sure if we had five times more money, we would have had establishing scenes with townsfolk and cars. There’s no reason to [do that here].

This film is about many things, but one of the things that I love is set-ups where you have a married couple and then suddenly — in this case, the husband — suddenly discovers that maybe he doesn’t know so much about his wife. He begins to ask: ‘Who is this person? Do I even know them?’ I just love that set-up. So, that puts a big starting point for a film and you just want to be with these people. That’s why we stay at home with them and see what happens.

JW: Since your cast is so concentrated, can you talk about what you were looking for while casting the main characters?

YA: Chris Messina, who plays Noomi’s husband Lewis, he is kind of like the audience. This thing is playing out and suddenly, he’s being drawn into it and he’s the more naive American. Noomi and Joel’s characters … both come with these big secretive pasts in Europe. And this guy [Messina], he grew up in America, he didn’t see and experience the kind of stuff that these people experienced. 

He’s caught in the middle of it and he’s us. But later, he becomes more than us, he becomes a very active participant in it. It was very important to get somebody who would be, on the one hand, likable and good. You say, ‘I like this guy, he’s a good guy, I trust him.’ On the other hand, he’s explosive and unpredictable sometimes. And Chris Messina has that stuff. He’s a great character actor, he’s very unpredictable, and he’s always doing something else.

Then Amy Seimetz, what I love about her performance is … the film is about secrets. She is this person from the ‘50s who, if there’s something inside the family, if there’s something wrong in her household, she doesn’t want to talk about it. She keeps this veneer of how things should look from the outside. But now, she’s confronted with a problem she needs to talk about, and she needs to open up about it. Which is exactly the theme of the film. From the moment we meet her, she has this inner struggle about: ‘Am I gonna actually acknowledge what is happening and make it explicit?’ Amy is super smart, she’s a great actress, she’s very, very subtle and I think she did a phenomenal job in terms of capturing that.

Joel … he has to be tied to a chair [for most of the film]. It’s hard for actors [who like] to move and walk around [for blocking purposes]. It’s such a large part of their toolbox. Joel is a very precise actor — he makes decisions, he makes choices, and then he does them. If you want him to do something different, you have to talk to him. He’s very controlled and to do it while you’re tied the whole movie, that’s not a joke.

And Noomi … she had to hold the whole movie together with the emotional stuff that she had to go through. Both in the present and past scenes. Because there was something a bit like a theater piece about it, it’s so closed and these characters are just involved with each other, [so] there was an opportunity to explore it.

JW: There is something very cathartic about Jews taking revenge on Nazis and while Maja isn’t Jewish, her actions still play into that concept — at least for me. Was that part of your thought process for this project?

YA: For me, not so much. The project started as film that was about the Holocaust and there were concentration camp scenes and it was a much bigger Nazi-Holocaust film. Then, maybe because I’m Israeli, we have a lot of it [in our culture]. We’re growing up with a lot of this stuff and I didn’t want to do another Holocaust film. That’s actually why we changed it to the Romani genocide.

Noomi and I wanted it to have the Nazi [element], but for me, it was more about the war crime. The kind of thing that she accuses him of is not classic Nazi stuff. It’s not concentration camps, it’s a war crime that could’ve happened in Serbia, anywhere. That, for me, kind of released us and allowed us to explore the stuff about memory, forgiveness, PTSD, the couples stuff, and how you deal with finding out this stuff about your spouse you didn’t know. It was more the personal drama of it.

Noomi and I did aggressive rewrites on this film. We were talking and then I executed what we were talking about. It was just after the Ford-Cavanaugh hearing. There’s something very similar about [that]. She said, ‘This, this, and this happened.’ And he said, ‘No, it wasn’t me, I wasn’t there, it didn’t happen.’

You can never go back in time and know, and there’s something so interesting that the fact is gone — the underlying fact is gone. Now, we have to deal with it; we have to deal with it because the fact is gone. And I love that people are drawn into this contradiction. My aim is not to solve the contradiction, but kind of enact it, put you through it, and make it more difficult.

JW: The kidnap scene feels reminded me of the Mossad’s capture of Adolph Eichmann in the early 1960s. Did you want to draw a parallel to that real-world event?

YA: No … In the original script, Maja and her husband went together and kidnapped him. I said, ‘No, it’s better if she does it alone.’ How would this woman kidnap this guy, especially a big guy like Joel? It’s not just about knocking him out, he’s heavy. Trying to do that is not easy and I thought, ‘Let’s make it hard for her. Let’s make her try to deal with it herself before she brings him home.’

I thought, ‘That’s a cool way to get into her mindset. Just to have her try to deal with it alone. And only after she fails dealing with it alone [does she bring in her husband].’ Because all her life she was hiding that stuff, so her impulse is to hide it and keep hiding it … I was thinking about it in terms of ‘How would the character, a woman like her in the ‘50s [deal with it?’].

And you know, she’s Noomi Rapace, she’s a badass, but still, it’s not easy. We made it difficult for her. How does she try to deal with it alone? What would it look like?’

JW: Obviously, the audience is meant to wonder if Joel’s character is actually a Nazi war criminal for most of the movie. How did you work to keep up the mystery and suspense on that front?

YA: I think the mystery is real to me because Joel’s character is a likable guy. He’s not a monster, he doesn’t look like a monster, and the character is not a monster. Also, Noomi’s performance … this thing is so emotionally difficult for Maja, that her reaction to the entire situation might seem over the top at times. If she is right about what she’s saying, this reaction makes sense, but her husband, he looks at her and doesn’t know if it makes sense. For him, he’s never seen his wife like this before. 

Through him, we look at her and say, ‘Well, does her reaction makes sense? Does it seem like her memories are consistent? Does she act like a rational person here?’ And the answer is: ‘Of course not! She can’t be rational after what happened…if she’s right.’

But it doesn’t help convince you that she’s right or the fact that she’s acting the way she does. In the movie, this [traumatic experience] happened 16 years earlier. Part of the thing that I discussed with Noomi is that her character can start doubting her own memory. Then she becomes a little more desperate to get a confession from him, which is not a good place to be in. So we made it harder for her and not just the audience who’s not sure how to react to this.

JW: We spent a lot of time in basement, where Maja and Lewis are keeping Thomas. It’s a location that becomes this kind of ominous of torture den. What did you want to go for with the design of that set?

YA: Because we spend a lot of time there, we wanted to make it big enough, so we could move the camera around and we could make it something that is an integral part of the house. We put a lot of tools and knick knacks and a lot of stuff that you would believably feel these people are using. It’s the dark part of their house, so we tried to make it look broken-in, lived-in, used, and big enough to sustain what we wanted to sustain.

Then there was also a challenge…because we were constantly coming back there, [we asked ourselves] ‘How can we change the lighting set-up, so it’ll look a little different every time?’ Otherwise, it would be too repetitive. You want to slightly change it all the time without feeling like you violated the rules and physicality of the space. It was a challenge and [cinematographer Kolja Brandt] did a great job on that.

JW: The movie is set in the ‘50s, which is often depicted as an idyllic time period in popular culture. Can you talk about bringing the period to life and balancing the utopian concept of the 1950s with the darker elements of Maja and Thomas’ story?

YA: We tried to recreate the ‘50s. There was two things: one is making it look authentic, but also making it not feel like it’s a stuffy period film. Sometimes, period films feel like homework to me. Like, ‘Oh, I’m watching a period film’ as opposed to being cool and modern. I can’t explain it verbally, but I know it when I see it. I can show you a film [and say] ‘This is cool, this is cool, this is not cool.’ 

And [I worked closely] with my principal creative partners, Kolja, the DP; Nate Jones, the production designer; and Christina Flannery, the costume designer. I showed them films and we talked and said, ‘We want this stuff and not that kind of stuff.’ Then we wanted the film to be dark and that’s about how you light it and how dark you can go, emotionally and visually. There was a lot of thought put into this. I never did a period piece, so for me, it was a blast.

The Secrets We Keep arrives in select theaters Wednesday, Sep. 16 before hitting VOD platforms Friday, Oct. 16.