Review: ‘Secret Mall Apartment’ is an Intriguing Look at Urban Space and Counterculture

Sometimes it takes a moment or two – or a good deal of context – to truly understand the meaning or reference of a project’s title. In other cases, it’s extremely straightforward: what you see is what you get. While its title may be easy to understand, there’s nothing conventional about the story told in Secret Mall Apartment, which focuses on the shared space illegally and quietly inhabited by a collective of artists in the Providence Mall for four years. Its randomness is its best asset, since no one would have expected it, and this documentary is all about an unusual story and what its title achievement represented to those involved.

Secret Mall Apartment covers the years between 2003 and 2007, when Michael Townsend and a handful of his colleagues went into the newly-constructed mall in Providence, Rhode Island and, determined to sleep there to engage with a construction project they hadn’t endorsed and didn’t support, happened upon an area that had flown under the radar and which they could claim as their own. Until it was discovered, they shared many countercultural gatherings and memories in a home they created that stood in stark opposition to the commercialism surrounding it.

This documentary immediately brings to mind Man on Wire, another heist-like nonfiction film that begins with a high-minded and somewhat out-of-nowhere proposition from an eccentric personality that leads to something that’s definitely against the law but not nearly as serious as something clearly immoral like murder. This film isn’t quite as fanciful or stylized as the Oscar-winning chronicle of Philippe Petit’s balancing act, but it should appeal to the same audiences who wonder what kind of people have ideas that go completely against the grain and are compelled to see them realized, even if they’re going to require extensive effort that may lead to nothing in return.

This film benefits from the active and enthusiastic participation of the individuals at the center of its narrative, removed enough in time from their crimes of breaking, entering, and other associated offenses, to look back at what they did as a youthful accomplishment from long ago in their past. There’s absolutely a sense of pride in being able to pull this off, and to go undiscovered for as long as they did, establishing a place of respite that felt like their own even if they never knew if it would still be accessible or even standing the next time they came to visit.

There’s more to this film than just the story of what went into finding, furnishing, and forming memories in this secret mall apartment. It looks at the announcement of the construction of the mall and the detrimental effects it was going to have on the community, namely the people who might be displaced by it and who would never be able to afford the items that would soon be sold within its walls. There’s something about this act of defiance that feels like a rebellion against institutions that feel far too corporate and don’t actually speak to the needs of a population that might have benefited from more lasting and reparative improvement efforts.

Secret Mall Apartment is the latest film from director Jeremy Workman, whose past credits include the Oscar-shortlisted documentary short film Deciding Vote and the features Lily Topples the World and The World Before Your Feet. It continues a tradition of the exploration of public space and how it plays into the way people act. This is an objectively interesting and curious story, one that’s brought to invigorating life by a frank and eye-opening interrogation of the people involved and not just what they did in that apartment but how it related to and shaped the rest of their lives. It’s possible but not likely that similar such spaces exist out there in the world, and this film captures and questions the many elements that went into the formation of this unique place that can’t ever be exactly recreated.

Movie Rating: 7/10