Vague Visages’ Maddie’s Secret review contains minor spoilers. John Early’s 2025 movie features himself, Kate Berlant and Eric Rahill. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

With “camp” now being used in the cultural lexicon to describe anything even vaguely queer or melodramatic, we may have strayed too far from Susan Sontag’s original idea that the purest camp is best described as a “seriousness that fails.” Highly stylized melodramas like Todd Haynes’ May December (2023) are widely received as camp, though the director didn’t use that mode of storytelling as a reference and was confused by critiques. If camp is a “seriousness that fails,” then could a melodrama that effectively probes the power dynamics of a relationship born out of statutory rape be insufficiently serious, just because it pairs those themes with dark comedy?

Maddie’s Secret, the directorial debut of comedian John Early (Search Party, 2016-22), initially appears to invite many of these same questions. Like May December, the film doesn’t simplistically parody a similar brand of earnest Lifetime melodrama so much as it affectionately pays tribute to it. Here, the titular secret of a budding food influencer, portrayed by Early in drag (with a refreshing lack of winks towards the camera), is a historical eating disorder, which resurfaces just as she is promoted from dishwasher to on-camera talent at a culinary content creation company called Gourmaybe. After Maddie’s emotionally abusive mother (Kristen Johnson as Beverlee Ralph) suggests that the camera adds 10 pounds, the protagonist feels overcome with a desire to binge-eat and “purge,” and concocts various lies when caught in the act, such as telling her loving husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), that she vomits due to her pregnancy. As expected from Early, Maddie’s Secret is a funny film, but the filmmaker’s earnest affection for Maddie means she is never treated as the butt of the joke. Despite the stylistic artifice, it has the same inherent empathy that Haynes has for his subject in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), even if the musician’s depiction as a Barbie doll threatens to suggest an emotional detachment.

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Even with such earnestness, Maddie’s Secret doesn’t provide a particularly insightful look at life with an eating disorder. Early draws from vintage after-school specials and Lifetime movies — all examples of pure camp which fit the “seriousness that fails” descriptor. The cinematic grammar of the binge-eating sequences (defined by extreme close-ups and fast edits) aren’t intended to make an audience laugh so much as reflect on the inherent genre exploitation, in which young audiences learn about important social topics through simplified concepts and sensationalism. Later on, when Early introduces other hospital patients with related conditions, they’re treated like quirky comic characters, as if they were created on-the-fly by a screenwriter who realized they bit off more than they can chew by tackling a subject they’re arguably unfamiliar with.

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Replicating specific genre tropes helps reaffirm why Lifetime-like films have been so rarely effective at raising social awareness about certain topics, and why generations who grew up watching them came away with an ironic appreciation for their dramatically misguided approaches. The deranged films that seemingly inspired Early are every bit as fundamental in shaping his vision as more “knowing” works of camp, such as Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, which parallels Maddie’s on-set rivalry with a more polished influencer named Emily (Claudia O’Doherty). In the case of the 1995 movie, Joe Eszterhas’ screenplay was the seriousness that failed, with the Dutch director approaching it in a manner that Sontag described as “seeing everything in quotation marks.” Early isn’t ironically detached from his material — again, it can’t be understated just how much he adores his protagonist– but his self-awareness about the dubious qualities of the film’s influences means much of the world around Maddie is similarly in quotation marks.

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Take Maddie’s best friend, Deena (Kate Berlant), who Early introduces by holding just a second too long on her face as she leers over Maddie changing out of her work clothes — a homophobic trope of someone who exists purely to unrequitedly lust over the heroine. As queer performers, Early and Berlant are both highly aware of the protagonist’s regressive nature and have fun blowing it up to ridiculous proportions, which is where Maddie’s Secret walks its most difficult tightrope. The archetypal characters who would be equally at home in a broader genre parody co-exist with those written with straightforward sincerity, which should theoretically threaten to tear the fabric of the movie’s reality apart. But when that reality is already in quotation marks, it creates a more fascinating comic friction.

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Camp is a near impossible sensation to manufacture without feeling forced, but Early manages to evoke it with ease in Maddie’s Secret. The filmmaker’s instincts as a comedian and sincere affection for disreputable melodramas work together to make something far more earnest than one might expect, as he laughs with the genre rather than making jokes at its expense.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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