2024 Show
Louis Theroux · United Kingdom · English
A standard documentary that fails to match the severity of the crimes it covers
Can I Tell You a Secret? is a two-hour long documentary that hardly needs to be that long. The stories of the female victims are urgent and important, but the editing doesn’t do them favors. They’re dragged by repetitive music, repeated stock videos, and relentless reenactments, which seem cheesy and unnecessary. The docuseries also buries what I believe should be the main point: misogyny. It’s misogyny that allowed the perpetrator, Matthew Hardy, to harass his female victims for more than 10 years without real consequences; misogyny that blamed the women for sharing revealing photos; misogyny that made the police dismiss their cases as trivial and unimportant. It’s clear that these women need to be taken seriously for anything to get done. Unfortunately, the documentary doesn’t seem all that interested in doing that.
Three women's lives are changed forever when a prolific stalker infiltrates their social media accounts. And they're only a fraction of his many victims.
Victims of Matthew Hardy, a serial cyberstalker who poses as other people and spreads damaging rumors about them, come forward and bravely share their stories in this two-part documentary.
At this point, Netflix documentaries are a parody of themselves. The streamer partners with different production studios across different countries, but somehow, in the end, they all carry the same look, sound, and feel, which was intriguing at first, but now feels trite.
Women’s stories matter, but this documentary unfortunately isn’t it.
Renee Cuisia is the lead curator at A Good Movie to Watch. In her spare time, she likes to watch K-dramas and analyze them to death. She's also seen You've Got Mail one too many times but is still convinced it's one of the greatest films out there.
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