‘Secret Mall Apartment’ Review: Offbeat SXSW Doc Is a Nice Place to Visit, but You Wouldn’t Want to Live There
variety.comMichael Nordine Some solutions to the housing crisis are more creative than others. 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.
The aptly named “Secret Mall Apartment,” directed by Jeremy Workman and executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg, is a thoughtful celebration of the DIY artistry behind that experiment, but only a so-so investigation of it.
Like a lot of great plans, this one was barely planned at all. After he and three of his friends decided to see who could pull off living inside Providence Place Mall the longest, Michael Townsend, drawing on a random memory of the building’s construction four years earlier, recalled a “nowhere space” where he and his cohort might find shelter: a tucked-away “anomaly in the architecture” that had clearly been empty for the entirety of the building’s existence.
What was good enough for one night ended up being good enough for several, and four years later they were still there — until they weren’t.
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