John Early, the comedian the Guardian called "millennial comedy's new king," just directed his first film. Maddie's Secret opens in New York this weekend, and it is the kind of debut that makes you pay attention to everything this person does from here on out.
Early plays Maddie, a dishwasher at a food company who goes viral with a recipe and becomes the company's reluctant new face. That premise could go in a hundred different directions, and Early takes it somewhere genuinely surprising. Indiewire called it "a devastatingly sincere high melodrama with a studied queer sensibility," which is a lot of words but also exactly right. The film has a specific emotional frequency that you do not encounter very often, sincere without being sentimental, theatrical without being campy.
The ensemble is stacked. Kate Berlant, Kristen Johnston, and Conner O'Malley round out the cast, and each of them brings something distinct to the table. Berlant and Early have been collaborating for years, and their chemistry on screen reflects that history. Johnston, best known for 3rd Rock from the Sun, is doing some of the most interesting work of her career in the indie space. O'Malley, who has built a cult following through his unhinged online videos, brings an energy that somehow fits perfectly into Early's tonal world.
The film premiered at TIFF before Magnolia Pictures acquired it for distribution. That trajectory tells you something about the kind of movie this is. TIFF premieres that get picked up by Magnolia tend to be films with strong critical support and a specific audience that will find them. They are not designed to open at number one. They are designed to matter.
What interests me about Early as a director is that his comedy background gives him an unusual relationship with performance and tone. Comedians who move into directing often make comedies, which is fine. Early made something that uses comedic instincts in service of drama. The timing, the awareness of how an audience reads a moment, the willingness to let something be funny and devastating in the same breath. Those are skills that come from years of standup and sketch work, applied to a completely different form.
If you love indie cinema that takes real swings, this is the one your film friends will be talking about this summer. The transition from comedian to filmmaker is one of the hardest pivots in the industry, and Early makes it look like he has been doing this his whole life.
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