Take an abbreviated Jane Eyre, turn it on its head, toss in some steamy sex, and you get In Secret, a quietly captivating erotic thriller that passed us all by two years ago. This dark adaptation of Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin does little for those of us who want to be surprised by plot structure, but it works wonders for the rest of us. Not for a moment do we believe that the adulterous affair suggested by the title will end happily, but we also don't really care; anyone who disagrees has never seen Romeo and Juliet or any other romantic drama ever.
I suppose a brief outline will suffice, then: Therese (Elizabeth Olsen) is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly, spoiled cousin Camille (Tom Felton), watched over by her domineering aunt/mother-in-law Madame Raquin (Jessica Lange). When Camille's seductive friend Laurent (Oscar Isaac) comes calling, he and Therese embark on an intense affair that leads to murder, madness, and other exciting stuff. And if you don't expect all these things from the dark first scene, you can leave the fun stuff for us and go watch one of several mindless comedies in theaters right now.
Thus, our focus here is on style over substance. I said the first scene is dark, by which I do actually mean chromatically. Yeah, sure, the whole film is "dark" thematically, but director Charlie Stratton rightly decided to pair the heavy drama of a period piece with the striking visuals of Gothic thrillers, making every moment fraught with tension and rimmed with shadow. Stratton's screenplay -- which moves along at a surprisingly fast pace, though it is disguised by Florian Hoffmeister's (Mortdecai) meditative cinematography -- features very little dialogue, allowing for the actors, sets, and lighting to paint a nightmarish vision of hell itself, as Therese herself once describes her situation. Gabriel Yared (Cold Mountain, Shall We Dance?, 1408) crafted a symphonic score to accompany, and the great sweeping runs of stringed instruments would make the film feel overscored if the visuals weren't already so dramatic. In fact, the whole film teeters dangerously on the edge of operatic excess. The only thing that grounded it, for me, was the cast.
Jessica Lange is the undisputed soul of the film. And really, even for younger audiences or romantic viewers who might prefer the star-crossed lovers to be their protagonists, the film wouldn't work without a conniving, vulnerable, and passionate Madam Raquin to run things. Though some might say we've seen enough of Lange's crazy time in American Horror Story, here she does what she always does: She finds yet another nuanced, fully-realized character in the throes of madness unlike any we've seen yet. Miraculously, Olsen, Isaac, and Felton all match her, though perhaps less gracefully, scene for scene, with their own idiosyncratic psychoses. Olsen carries the weight of the film really well, allowing her teary, fearful gaze to sweep, wide-eyed, across almost every scene. Felton's pale simpering oozes a charm of its own, countered marvelously by Isaac's smoky stares and aggressive sensuality.
For as much as I'm throwing around descriptions of these people as "crazy", I don't want you to think this is a film populated with fearfully unstable individuals. No, this film isn't "about" (vile phrase) insanity. This film is about the ways in which normal people act and react under heavy cultural weights. These people are single parents who dote on their children, surrogate children searching for love, spouses stuck together without love or respect, a woman seeking freedom from cultural oppression, a man risking everything to be with his lover, and, ultimately, two people who learn that the sins of the past can never really leave us. Whether or not we agree with these characters' actions -- and Stratton has very cleverly allowed a lot of room for discussions on class, gender, family structure, morality/ethics, social norms, and marriage -- we can easily participate in their navigating the murky waters of forbidden romance, and hopefully emerge a bit better off than they do.
IMDb: In Secret
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