‘Maddie’s Secret’ Review: John Early’s Directorial Debut Isn’t Quite the Gag-Worthy Parody It Should Be [C+] TIFF
Once upon the 1980s there was a little NBCmovie about Kate, a seemingly perfect, beautiful housewife who harbored a dark and disturbing secret—she furtively ate to excess until she made herself vomit in the kitchen bathroom or a back alley. That movie, naturally entitled Kate’s Secret and starring 80s TV queen Meredith Baxter Birney, has been mostly discarded to the dustbin of B-side film history, forgotten to bargain basement VCR trash cans. That is, until now—when it appeared to have been rediscovered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Or was it?
Enter Maddie’s Secret, the directorial debut of comedian and actor John Early (30 Rock, Search Party), which just had its world premiere at TIFF. In the film, John plays the titular character, Maddie, a seemingly perfect Los Angeles housewife who early in the story goes from her role as dishwasher to a successful gig as a gourmet food social media influencer. But Maddie has a secret, too—the same as Kate did in 1986—bulimia. This eventually lands Maddie, as it did Kate, into eating disorder rehab (together with a beloved but troubled roommate), a bleeding burst esophagus, and an ultimate confrontation with the source of their troubles, their evil mothers.
But Maddie’s secret is not just her bulimia. Is that her movie is a remake, a clear and almost 1:1 repeat of the 1980s one, though neither the 2025 film nor the film festival sponsors appear to acknowledge this in any of the film’s materials.
This curious lack of attribution aside, Maddie’s Secret plays as a pretty decent comedy and a pretty terrible drama. Early reimagines the entire movie as a spoof, reflecting both his 2025 sensibilities (more on that shortly) and also that he understands that the original film, upon which he based his story, is at times preposterously campy and hilarious. Although the original filmmakers did not set out to make anyone laugh about eating disorders, that was the inadvertent result of their excessive tone, and Early is correctly and thankfully aware that he has to redirect the comedy elsewhere.
And so it is that Maddie’s Secret is at its best during its many, hysterical comedic moments. Early is a talented comedian and he plays Maddie with hilarious sincerity and seriousness. Kristen Johnson is both funny but also tremendously evil as Maddie’s villainous mother. Kate Berlant is Maddie’s power lesbian, aggressive coworker, and rakes in the laughs. Earl’s updated touch on the story is to spoof and comment on internet and influencer culture, and even the excesses of queer culture. For a movie about an ultimately profoundly difficult illness to make you laugh in this way without losing the thread altogether is nothing sort of impressive, particularly for a directorial debut.
Unfortunately, Maddie’s Secret stumbles in almost every other respect and is utterly at odds with itself when it comes to the important subject matter it tackles.
Yes, comparisons to the original are inevitable—regardless of whether the filmmakers saw it fit to give specific attribution or not. At its core, Secret (both Kate’s and Maddie’s), for all its camp, is movie about a difficult, gritty subject. The 1980s were a difficult, gritty decade, and audiences wanted to have discussions about these topics, sort of how 1950s audiences were so thirsty for movies about alcoholism—finally. Despite its campiness, the original film fit perfectly into the decade in which it was created.
But 2020s audiences want none of this, and Early knows and understand this. The result is a neutered film that betrays its own purpose of bringing serious recognition of this serious subject.
In the original film, Meredith Baxter (famous for Family Ties, and later a queer icon in her own right), after disposing of preposterous amounts of food in grotesquely disturbing ways—in ways that were so obscene, they became hilarious—dealt with a very serious, very difficult subject. The movie portrayed bulimia raw, unadorned. It eased you at first but then fully exposed you to the fact that she was vomiting, at times graphically, and how this was destroying her body.
Maddie’s Secret is essentially what happens when you time travel the 1980s into the 2020s, a microcapsule of how our times, values, and sensibilities have changed for better or for worse. As if you had taken the original film and buried it into a time capsule. Your general take on the contentious topic of whether things were better now or then naturally will vary. Some bemoan the lack of challenging material and excessive coddling in art today. Others point out that the past was not all that, particularly given the unequal and even cruel society that characterized it.
Whatever your take on these divisive topics, you are sure to notice that Maddie’s Secret does not ultimately work because it is remaking a movie that back then was trying to do something that filmmakers are not actually willing to do today—tell inherently awful stories. Maddie’s Secret covers the subject matter of eating disorders and bulimia with a coat of bubbly pink pain, made up of Instagram memes and cutesy pop star references. Maddie is shown vulnerable, but the filmmakers of today would never dare show her rawest, likely for fear of offending whatever subgroup of audience members they were catering to.
The script’s biggest stumble comes towards the end, where the extent of Maddie’s mother’s abuse is revealed in a shocking and ineffective scene. Rather than humanize bulimia, this gambit ends up making it surreal. According to the film, it is caused by a level of abuse that is so barbaric it is unlikely to exist in most of the real world. It is, suddenly, not a very real problem.
But of course, that is exactly the opposite of what this story is about—bringing attention to a pervasive disorder that lies well hidden. This “don’t worry, it only happens to the worst of us, you don’t have to get stressed” placebo to the 2025 audience undermines the film’s stated purpose of raising awareness, reducing it simply to an effective but ultimately not memorable series of comedic skits.
And there is an additional irony in Maddie’s Secret turning Meredith’s mother into such a twisted monster, blaming her and her 1980s generation—who practiced Atkins, “a 2000s version of paleo”—for everything. The irony is this: the film is copied almost verbatim from a movie made by the very generation the movie now sets out to blame. It is that generation that, flaws and all, first had the audacity to call attention to this problem on screen, and to do so unadorned (however imperfectly), without turning it into a joke to “soften the blow.”
Sometimes, life was just hard, and things were not pretty. The filmmakers behind Kate’s Secret were not afraid to express that visceral reality to audiences and let them handle it. The forces behind Maddie’s Secret, by contrast, could not come up with a truly original take—they simply regurgitated it all.
Grade: C+
Maddie’s Secret had its World Premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.
- ‘The Secret Agent’ Review: Kleber Mendonça Filho Returns with a Timely Tale of Brazilian Corruption and Persecution [A-] - November 25, 2025
- ‘The Captive’ Review: Alejandro Amenábar’s Account of Cervantes as a Teller of Tales is Itself a Powerful Lesson in Storytelling [A] TIFF - September 10, 2025
- ‘Train Dreams’ Review: Joel Edgerton Shines in Contemplative Drama About Life and Technological Progress [A-] TIFF - September 9, 2025
‘Jay Kelly,’ ‘Hamnet,’ ‘Pluribus,’ ‘Task’ and More on AFI’s Top 10 Films and Television of 2025 Lists 
‘Frankenstein’ to Receive Visionary Honor from Palm Springs International Film Awards 
Robert Yeoman to be Honored with American Society of Cinematographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award 
National Board of Review: ‘One Battle After Another’ Tops in Film, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor; Netflix Lands Four in Top 10