The Secret Woman review roundup: what to know about Netflix's Danish thriller — and why "Anna Ekberg" is two people
An amnesiac, a shipping heiress, a suspiciously mild husband — and a novelist who does not exist.
A woman runs a café on a Norwegian island. A stranger walks in and calls her by the wrong name.
That's the whole hook of The Secret Woman (Den hemmelige kvinde), which hit Netflix on August 28, and it's a good one. Louise Andersen (Natalie Madueño) has no memory before two years ago. A DNA test says she's actually Helene Söderberg, a Danish shipping heiress who vanished three years back, leaving behind a husband (Claes Bang, doing his patented "pleasant man you should not trust") and a small son. She leaves her boyfriend Joachim (Pål Sverre Hagen) and goes home to a life she can't remember and a family that remembers her very well.
It runs just under two hours. It is directed by Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg and co-written with Anders August — the same team that made Loving Adults, another Netflix Danish thriller you may have watched at 1 a.m. and immediately forgotten.
What the critics are saying
Split. Badly.
The Guardian gave it two stars and, per its blurb on Rotten Tomatoes, decided the story had "a scatty plot that won't be worrying Stieg Larsson or Jo Nesbø." RogerEbert.com was similarly unmoved, needling Helene's instant wardrobe transformation from island granola to corporate girl boss and noting that the police, as ever in these things, do nothing.
On the other end, Heaven of Horror's three-star review called it "terrifyingly realistic in ways I never anticipated" and argued it's a clear improvement on Loving Adults. Nordic Watchlist thinks Madueño's performance is the thing that makes the whole engine turn.
Where everyone lands:
- Madueño is excellent, essentially playing two women at once.
- Bang is doing the most with a character written mostly as "smiles, then doesn't."
- The plot leans hard on convenient memory flashes and even more convenient revelations.
- The last ten minutes are the best ten minutes.
A thriller that saves its nerve for the finale is either building suspense or stalling. Critics can't agree which one this is.
The Anna Ekberg situation
Here is the part I actually want to talk about. The film is adapted from a 2017 Danish bestseller by Anna Ekberg.
Anna Ekberg is not a person.
She is the pen name of two men — Anders Rønnow Klarlund, a film director, and Jacob Weinreich, who has written something like 25 children's books — who also publish crime fiction together as A.J. Kazinski. They created "Anna" specifically for this book and its follow-ups, which, they've said, all circle the same question of whether men and women can actually have happy marriages.
They've explained the female name as a way of getting closer to the material: writing as Ekberg meant, in their words, that "we can just hide behind another identity," per an interview cited by The Cinemaholic.
A novel about a woman living under a fabricated identity, written by a fabricated woman, adapted into a film about whether you can trust anyone's account of who they are. The joke tells itself.
Should you watch it?
If you're a Nordic noir completist, yes, obviously, you already have. If you want a plot-driven Sunday-night thriller with a strong lead and a lot of fjord, also yes. If you need it to make sense on a second viewing, the critics who've done that are politely suggesting you don't.
And if you finish it and want to read the book, go in knowing the author is two guys from Copenhagen. It's more fun that way.
