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‘Secret Mall Apartment’ Review: Offbeat SXSW Doc Is a Nice Place to Visit, but You Wouldn’t Want to Live There
Jeremy Workman's doc 'Secret Mall Apartment' tells the story of artists in Providence who lived in a hidden alcove in a mall for four years.
For a group of artists in Providence, Rhode Island, that idea was put to the test when they infiltrated and inhabited a hidden alcove in their local mall for four years — a symbol of gentrification they repurposed into a decidedly anticapitalist communal space. Grainy footage of the group shimmying between narrow walls and gingerly hoisting their thrift-store sofa up a ladder give the documentary an appropriately lo-fi, lived-in vibe befitting their original intent. They do so by reconstructing the apartment on a soundstage and having Townsend reenact the moment he was finally caught, a lightly surreal sequence that resembles nothing so much as Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal.” Capturing something through the lens of a camera has a tendency to make it feel both more and less real, which is entirely apropos of a four-year period in which a once-liminal space became something like a home.
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