---
title: "Maddie's Secret (2025) review"
description: "Showgirls and John Waters fans to the front. Just check the nihilism at the door."
url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/maddies-secret/
---

![A still from Maddie's Secret (2025)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/maddies-secret/backdrop.webp)

# Maddie's Secret (2025)

Aug 17, 2026 | 2 min read | Rated 3.5 out of 5 | Dir. John Early

Showgirls and John Waters fans to the front. Just check the nihilism at the door.

It’s a camp classic in the making, no argument. Garish lighting, unreal sets, the exact texture of a Lifetime problem-of-the-week movie cranked to eleven. But where Waters or Verhoeven would twist the knife, Early refuses. He takes Maddie and her eating disorder completely seriously while the whole thing stays a riot.

Turns out camp and sincerity were never actually enemies.

Early wrote it, directed it, and plays Maddie himself, in drag, and somewhere in the second half I forgot a man was under the wig at all. She isn’t a bit. She isn’t a victim, and she isn’t some flawless little martyr either. She’s a person, and you get wrapped up in her even while you’re laughing. The proof is the showdown with her mother (Kristen Johnston, tremendous) in the last act. It’s a real gut-punch, and it’s earned, because the movie spent the whole runtime refusing to condescend to her.

I laughed out loud more than once. Early declaring himself “just an ally” at the dance class wrecked me. That’s his gift, the joke and the ache landing in the same beat.

My one hangup is entirely my own baggage. I have a phobic aversion to movies about LA and LA production culture, and this thing is soaking in it: the viral food studios, the influencer grind, the executive producers of “The Boar” (the obvious riff on The Bear). Overrepresented, for me anyway, and I drifted whenever it got deep in the weeds on content creation. But I’ll give it this. The food-media angle sharpens the eating-disorder story in a way I didn’t see coming. A woman whose whole livelihood is performing joy about food, quietly at war with eating it. That’s a cruel, smart engine, even if I couldn’t make myself care about the office it runs in.

A movie of the week with a soul. They don’t make them like this, and they really don’t make them this kind.

Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/maddies-secret/)

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I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side.

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