Secrets (2017)

(On TV, March 2022) I am addicted to low-budget movies aired on BET channel. Don’t send help—I’m really enjoying it. Writer-director Juwan Lee’s Secrets is almost exactly what I was expecting when I sat down to watch it—a trashy thriller featuring an attractive all-black cast, filled with low-budget shortcuts, nonsensical staging and dumbfounding plotting. Here’s the thing, though:  It’s fun, fun, fuuun. Often preposterous, sometimes unintentionally funny, and almost always entertaining for a variety of reasons. Our protagonist is a successful architect who can’t help but go from one affair to another despite a comfortable married life and a smoke-show of a wife (Denyce Lawton). Trouble strikes when a new colleague joins the firm where he’s working, and his life starts falling apart: mysterious threatening messages, an all-consuming new affair, and so on. It gets wild by the third act hits, with ludicrous plot development badly introduced and disconnected events that don’t reinforce the film’s central theme. (Just wait until the film finally drops who’s been sending the threatening messages.)  Secrets is really not a good movie: the writing is blunt, the DNA-through-blood-type science is terrible, the backstory timelines make no sense, the structure is weak (all the way to abruptly changing viewpoint character for one or two scenes, after an opening narrated by the male lead), the wrap-up lets the underdeveloped femme fatale go free and the lead character unpunished for his transgressions and the staging is so inept as to make absolutely no sense—check out that scene in which the wife is picked up in front of the house and ask yourself who, in real life, would be positioned like that. But that’s the charm of those BET channel movies—they’re lively in ways that slicker films are not. I was proud of myself for anticipating The Lingerie Scene thirty seconds in advance (BET movies can’t feature nudity, so they often go for the next best thing: an attractive actress in fancy lingerie… and I love it every single time) and the unintentional trashiness of the result is enough to keep anyone interested. Secrets is exactly what I wanted from a BET movie, and I look forward to many more such films. Keep doing what you’re doing, BET.