Secret Mall Apartment Movie Review (2025)
A documentary about people who not only hung out at a mall constantly, but found a way to have a secret mall apartment for four years? Yep, I am totally here for it.
In my teen years, I used to wish that I could live at a mall. To have everything you have ever needed at your fingertips plus a food court?? Money didn’t concern me because I had none, so just the idea was good enough for me. But I never thought it could actually be done.
Secret Mall Apartment is a documentary about 8 friends who built and decorated a small apartment in the Providence Place Mall in Rhode Island and lived there without anyone’s knowledge for 4 years.
This is a great film. The way it is structured is so engaging that you can’t wait to hear more – and it is very very funny. The entire audience and I laughed out loud countless times during the movie for a variety of reasons, but primarily one.
We have all wanted to pull the wool over people’s eyes in our lifetimes. We all have those, “the rules are meant to be broken” thoughts – whether we go through with it or not. This group of artists, who were run out of their section of town due to gentrification and urban development, found a loophole right in the heart of the beast that was working to kick people like them out of town. So what if they just moved right in?
Michael Townsend, a professional tape artist, remembered there being a strange pocket of space as he watched the mall being constructed. It was a strangely built monstrosity and he was an artist – he noticed things.
As this idea of living in the mall developed among friends, they went looking for this area, thinking it could be a fun place to hide and crash for a week. More than anything, they just wanted to see if they could get away with it.
Four years later, they had found ways to not only furnish this tiny apartment, but eat there, sleep there, and (mostly) evade any detection, even though alarms were going off all the time. And they filmed almost everything they had done as they were doing it.
Intercut into the sections of story about the mall apartment are other stories of the art that these artists created. Including tributes to 9/11 airline passengers and firefighters who lost their lives, victims of the Oklahoma city bombing, and work on the children’s wards in the hospital, this group gave a lot of their time, energy, and love.
I got the benefit of sitting through a Q&A with director Jeremy Workman and he talked quite a bit about the making of this film. After a random meeting between him and Michael Townsend, they became fast friends and Micheal mentioned this story. Jeremy had never heard of it, but quickly did some research and was fascinated by the fact that no one had ever thought to do anything with the footage that they had recorded. With covid lockdowns and lots of time, Jeremy slowly talked to all of the participants and everyone agreed to get onboard with having their story told. Enough time had passed and, with the decline of malls in general, it was all very fitting.
This is an extremely enjoyable film that will have you laughing, curious, and living vicariously through these people who are all so relatable. But don’t go getting any ideas! There are lots more cameras now than there were back then.
Runtime: 91 minutes
Motion Picture Rating: Unrated (I’d say somewhere around PG only for some mild language and subject matter)
Languages Spoken In The Film: English
Should You Watch It? Yes
Did I Cry? Nope
My Rating: 3.75/5 Stars
Available: Hopefully in a movie theater near you. There are no plans to stream the film at the moment, but it is playing around the country with different opening weekends.
