Critic Reviews

A complicated family story that takes place in three distinct time periods, and that's handled with astonishing ease and fluidity by director Claude Miller.

A gripping mystery and an ever-timely reminder of the terrible power of repression and silence.

A Secret is suitably tense, sad, and deeply poignant as it moves toward an epilogue exploring the idea that everything rots and decays, no mater how well-maintained.

Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision that serves both to intensify and delay the emotional impact of the film’s climactic disclosures.

A clanking, old-fashioned period drama infused with almost unbearable grief, Claude Miller's film A Secret has an enormous significance in France that it can never possess elsewhere.

The filmmaker's decision to shoot the past in color and the present in murky black and white is an inspired visual translation of psychological truth.

The acting is exceptional. If parts of A Secret veer toward soap opera, the ensemble work reduces the suds to a minimum.

A fine drama that stands as Gallic vet Claude Miller's best in at least a decade.

Deepened by its complex back-and-forth chronology, deft shifts in perspective, and a significantly counterintuitive color-coding of past and present, A Secret suggests that it's not illicit passion, but rather the crime of denial, that has screwed up this family down the generations.

Claude Miller's ravishingly shot drama A Secret gives up its titular mystery early, so it may seem odd to speak of the suspense it generates.