Kimber Myers
Secret Mall Apartment could have remained content to be a heist-movie-style documentary about, well, a secret mall apartment. It could have focused just on the efforts of a group of eight people to find a space in an active mall, sneak in a suite of furniture and two tons of cement blocks, and evade detection by the mall’s security team — and it could have simply been entertaining. Yet just as the secret mall apartment wasn’t just a secret mall apartment, this film from director Jeremy Workman (The World Before Your Feet) has loftier ambitions and is far more than it might initially appear.
Composed of wonderfully shitty home videos from the early aughts, contemporary interviews, archival footage, and a (mostly) enjoyably shoddy reenactment, Secret Mall Apartment also possesses the trappings and fun of a heist picture. These elements are especially evident in the fizzy, jazzy score from Clare and Olivier Manchon and the tension Workman evokes in the audience as we wonder how long the secret can remain a secret in a busy Providence, Rhode Island, mall. However, it wasn’t a group of pranksters or even unhoused people desperate for a place to live who found and built out the apartment. Instead, the effort was led by Michael Townsend, a beloved RISD professor and local artist known for creating installations in unlikely spaces.
The Providence Place Mall was built around the turn of the millennium when traditional malls were still seen as a way to revitalize a region. Its construction required train tracks and a river to be relocated within the Rhode Island capital to accommodate its strange, sprawling footprint, which featured stores that residents of the adjacent neighborhood couldn’t afford to shop in. Townsend saw the weird layout as an opportunity that likely contained a small space, which he found and turned into a comfortable haven with the help of a small cadre of friends and fellow artists starting in 2003.
That space became more than just a hangout spot outfitted with couches, a TV, and a PS2; its clandestine existence was a commentary on the neighborhood’s gentrification and the mall as a fixture of a capitalist society. The apartment was a gathering spot for these friends and collaborators who worked on other projects together outside of its makeshift walls, but it was also defined by its precarious nature. Even once Townsend and the seven others smuggled in cement blocks to build a wall with a locked door, their time there was marked by concern that they’ll be discovered. That moment is a certainty for the audience since Secret Mall Apartment begins with a news story about its existence, so we know it’s only a matter of time, heightening the sense of suspense around its inevitability.
Secret Mall Apartment’s themes about commercialization and how neighborhoods evolve and devolve are engaging, but its most thought-provoking insights are about the impermanence of art — and how that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Townsend’s art outside of the mall apartment is equally ephemeral and has a far larger impact on the community than his most newsworthy work, partially because it wasn’t created to last. Yet because of its setting in a mall — a trend that was huge for a few decades but is basically a blip in human existence — it becomes even bigger, about the transience of everything and even life itself.
For all its big ideas, Secret Mall Apartment is full of charm and wonder. This is a breezy 91 minutes to spend with this idealistic group of people, and it’s easy to see why they kept coming back to the space they created, despite its dangers.
B+
“Secret Mall Apartment” is in select theaters Friday.
