Of the many starlets, superstars, superstarlets, singers, and miscellaneous rich girls that the media treated with relentless cruelty and dagger-eyed attention in the mid-2000s, few cases seemed to specifically torpedo a promising career more than Lindsay Lohan. Britney Spears already had a massive musical legacy, and after going through hell, she was eventually vindicated, her conservatorship dissolved. Paris Hilton, not appearing to have a particular stake in what she was famous for, seemed to weather the storm just fine; she even survived to see “Stars Are Blind” inexplicably become a nostalgia object for millennials of a certain age and terrible taste. Lohan, though… she wasn’t at Spears-level ubiquity, and her teen-to-adult work in Mean Girls and Robert Altman’s Prairie Home Companion seemed to hint at hidden depths beneath her polished Disney-kid exterior. Then she made some bad movies, faced some worse personal issues, and took, effectively, a decade-long break from acting.
Her new rom-com Our Little Secret is her third picture for Netflix. Her relationship with the streamer brought her back to screens starting with Falling For Christmas in 2022, doing a cross between a Hallmark movie and the kind of rom-com she might have transitioned into around the late 2000s. So basically, the bar at the outset was Just My Luck, a nigh-unwatchable 2006 failure to launch from which Chris Pine emerged largely unscathed, and by those standards, the consensus seems to be that, OK, Lindsay may not be “back” in the sense of appearing in a 3,000-screen wide release, but she’s proven herself ready to both do the work and play to her established fanbase of millennial women.
Our Little Secret does look more like a real movie than any of her Netflix productions so far; her other film for the streamer was Irish Wish, a rom-com that came out in March of 2024. The supporting cast of this film includes multiple SNL alumni (Jon Rudnitsky, Chris Parnell, and her Mean Girls co-star Tim Meadows) in that classic comedy-ringer way, Lohan’s dad is played by Henry Czerny, and her unofficial nemesis in the movie is played by Kristin Chenoweth – no massive stars, obviously, but all people with steady careers and plenty of big-screen appearances. The director is Stephen Herek, a Disney mainstay from the ’90s who somehow never made a Lohan vehicle before now (but did do Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and The Three Musketeers).
In premise, too, this is a lot like something that could have been a seasonal theatrical release, with a neo-screwball-meets-Family Stone setup: Avery (Lohan) arrives to spend Christmas with the family of her boyfriend Cameron (Rudnitsky), only to find out that Cameron’s sister Cassie (Katie Baker) is dating Avery’s childhood sweetheart and ex-boyfriend Logan (Ian Harding). For very contrived movie-ish reasons that somehow involve Avery spelling out “S-E-X” in a conversation with another adult, they agree to keep their past a secret. The real reason, of course, is that they may still harbor feelings for one another.
All that’s left is for Lohan to elevate the silly, inoffensive material. In other words, it’s time for her to pull an Anna Faris, or a Meg Ryan, or a pre-Oscar Emma Stone. I hope I’m not spoiling anyone’s fun when I say this does not precisely happen. Even some negative reviews of Our Little Secret have praised Lohan’s facility with screwball-ish rom-com, and frankly, I don’t see it. She lacks the heedless joy of the best rom-com heroines – that sense, so crucial to movies about people bickering their way into bed, that curt remarks and hapless slapstick are forms of foreplay. For example: There’s a scene where Avery must give a reading at her in-laws’ church, while accidentally high on THC-infused gummies, and she fakes her way through it with a terrified smile plastered on her face until she stumbles her way into the lyrics of “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang and incites a singalong. On its own, this is not especially funny. But it’s more notable that Lohan spends a lot of Our Little Secret wearing this same look, even when she’s supposed to be stone-cold sober. She still has the cautious bearing of someone who’s been burned by a lot of crummy movies, and wants to get through a few while maintaining a certain image of lacquered relatability.
In other words, her persona here better fits a rom-com character than a rom-com performer – and she’s not a witty enough actor to really pull off that meta dimension. She also lacks the forcefulness to steer her dialogue out of a ditch when the Netflix Auto-Movie 3000 feeds her repetition and clunky one-liners. In its blandly made-for-TV way, Our Little Secret tries to run a strange interference on Lohan’s extended break from acting and her ensuing rustiness. The movie’s unconvincing prologue opens in 2014, around the time Lohan disappeared from the movies after some attempts at self-effacing cameos in the beneath-her likes of Scary Movie 5 and a leading role in Paul Schrader’s The Canyons. To get us up to 2024, there’s an astonishingly ill-conceived montage of supposedly major cultural events from the past decade, a truly cursed historical record that avoids any presidential elections and a multi-year COVID pandemic, but makes time to check off the ice-bucket challenge, the invention of Beyond Meat, Warren Beatty reading the wrong Oscar winner, the fire at Notre Dame, the invention of the Cybertruck, and, naturally, multiple seismic Netflix series. (Truly, Squid Game was the Bernie Sanders’ Mittens of its day.)
Rather than providing cultural context or fun nostalgia, this sequence feels auto-generated by Facebook, and while it probably isn’t intentional gaslighting, it does throw the movie’s frame of reference off in a way that favors the idea that Lindsay Lohan was a major movie star. She isn’t mentioned in the montage, of course, but sure, in a world where Beyond Meat is one of a dozen highlights of recent history, Lindsay Lohan might also have been a major force in some unspecified Before Times. Thinking back through actual reality, though: Was Lohan ever really stunning in a movie? Was her career that promising? I’m not asking this to evoke the characters in Mean Girls, where she does a nice job of playing up her sincere confusion at her introduction to “girl world,” and convincingly affects a plastic sheen during her heel turn. And she’s quite endearing in A Prairie Home Companion (though, to be fair, everyone in that movie is, and she’s not exactly stealing scenes from Kevin Kline or Maya Rudolph). But that’s about it. Even in a beloved movie like Freaky Friday, she has child-star vibes, playing things broad and a little hammy. And that’s one of the good ones! She didn’t just follow up her peak years with a bad movie or two; she did like six.
None of this excuses her shabby tabloid treatment, of course. Certainly, in the right role – maybe one that’s well-written, and/or doesn’t require her to be a vaguely credentialed “consulting executive” – Lohan could again appear in a good movie. In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with a glorified TV movie like Our Little Secret, designed to burnish her image as a rom-com comedienne. Really, though, these movies are a stop-gap solution for a star who has yet to really grown up on screen.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.