Secret Mall Apartment (2024, Jeremy Workman)

60/100

Irresistible for about 40 minutes, thanks to the human Borrowers’ treasure trove of self-shot video—this project was surprisingly well-documented for the pre-smartphone era, and often shot from a variety of well-chosen angles that cut together beautifully, as if they anticipated a documentary being made from their footage somewhere down the line. Moving/construction montages look more or less as they might in a fictionalized feature; were the resolution not so abysmally low, and the gang not unmistakably two decades younger than they are in present-day interviews, I might even be suspicious. Workman also does a good job contextualizing the story within Providence’s urban “renewal” (loved stills of dilapidated neighborhoods in which the mall, visible at a distance, gets digitally emphasized), allowing us to understand the occupation of that space as not just an amusing prank but a punk response to dispossession. Trouble is, the ringleader, Michael Townsend, also perceived it as an art project, and apparently refused to sell the rights to his story for years, until Workman finally agreed to make a doc that would showcase the group’s various charitable artistic endeavors. All of which are laudable, Michael and his friends seem like total mensches (though I also understand why Adriana got out of that marriage—“I want a home, but I don’t want it in the mall. I want to buy things from the mall for my home”), but Apartment’s back half gets way more up-with-creativity than I’d have preferred. (Especially relative to the glancing acknowledgment of how white privilege informed their ability to allay mall security’s concerns and emerge with a slap on the wrist when finally caught.) Exploring the creepy “sculpture garden” Michael created in a disused drainage tunnel qualifies as relevant background for this tale; footage shot in a children’s hospital, by contrast, just comes across as self-congratulatory, the cinematic equivalent of appending a SoundCloud link to your unexpectedly viral tweet. Plus the “tenants” stopped videotaping themselves at some point, necessitating a few re-enactments (though watching production designer Suja Ono create a full-scale replica of the apartment is kinda fun, ditto I think it was Colin building a scale model of the entire mall to show where the apartment was located). Could’ve been great without Michael’s interference/insistence, still worth a look.