Jeremy Workman’s Secret Mall Apartment, now on Netflix after one of 2025’s biggest documentary theatrical runs, tells a story that sounds like a tall tale: in 2003, a group of eight Rhode Island artists, led by Michael Townsend, found a forgotten 750-square-foot void in the bones of the busy Providence Place Mall and lived in it, undetected, for four years, filming the whole experiment as they went. The episode’s title is Workman’s advice to filmmakers, but it turns out to be the film’s secret subject too, the thing the artists, the director, and the form all enact at once.
A Home Built in the Gap
The artists were furious at the mall, a civic project that had bulldozed the neighborhood where many of them lived and made art. They didn’t petition city hall or wait for affordable housing. They found an unused space inside the very structure that displaced them, an anomaly in the architecture reachable only by shimmying across beams, hauled in a couch, a TV, a PlayStation, and two tons of cinder blocks for a wall to hide it further, and simply moved in. They kept it for four years, until 2007, when Townsend was finally caught, arrested for trespassing, and banned from the mall, a ban that still stands today. That is “don’t wait for perfect conditions” as a way of living: denied the ideal space, you claim the impossible one. The anger had a specific address: developers had been pushing artists out of a beloved warren of old mills nearby. It is, as the film keeps reframing it, a middle finger to gentrification, a prank, and a genuine work of art all at once, and the film is self-aware enough to note that Townsend, who is white, could take such a lark without the policing a Black man might have faced.
The Same Move, Behind the Camera
Workman’s path to the film rhymes exactly with that.
Just go out and start shooting. Even if you think it’s gonna be something you show in your basement to your friends, that’s good enough.
He didn’t develop the project the proper way. He happened to meet Townsend in Athens, Greece, while shooting another documentary, didn’t believe the story, and Googled it back at his hotel. Townsend had turned down some thirty filmmakers over nearly two decades, all of whom pitched it as a wild prank movie; Workman’s pitch was that the prank was a Trojan horse for deeper ideas about art, gentrification, and how to live a life, and that was the first time the group had heard it. He earned the trust of all eight over months, something seventeen years of better-positioned filmmakers had never managed, then dove in with twenty-five hours of degraded footage the artists had shot themselves on $99 cameras bought at the mall’s RadioShack. Diving in is his entire mode. The son of Chuck Workman, the montage artist behind decades of Academy Awards reels, he grew up in editing rooms, makes only documentaries, and finances them independently rather than waiting on grants or streamers, a body of work that includes the SXSW Grand Jury winner Lily Topples the World and The World Before Your Feet.
Turning the Missing Footage Into the Movie
The conditions were never going to be perfect. The artists had stopped filming partway through, so the dramatic final chapter existed on no tape at all. Rather than wait for something that would never arrive, Workman rebuilt the apartment from scratch and brought the subjects back inside it, letting them revisit and re-experience the space on camera, so the recreation became a living, self-reflexive thing rather than the hand-on-a-doorknob cliché of true-crime reenactment. Much of what the artists did shoot was gloriously mundane, hours of them playing Grand Theft Auto or eating food-court pizza on a salvaged couch, a kind of accidental slow cinema. Workman cut it all into a deliberately nonlinear shape that sometimes breaks open and leaves you unsure whether you’re watching reality, archive, or reconstruction, a ballsier choice than the conventional version this story could have been. The absence of footage became one of the most resonant ideas in the film. His touchstone here is Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit’s secret, illegal, joyous high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, another audacious caper that uses the participants’ own footage and reenactment, and another film that turns out to be about far more than the stunt.
He pairs it with form-benders like The Act of Killing and the funny, scrappy spirit of American Movie, insisting that a documentary is allowed to be entertaining rather than dutifully serious, a conviction that gives the whole film its comedic, almost absurdist warmth.
Refusing to Wait for a Distributor
The third register is the business, and here the refusal is most explicit.
They gaslight filmmakers into thinking that filmmakers can’t do it themselves, that their films have no value.
Workman got distribution offers and didn’t like them, so he raised more money and built his own release: a booker, social-media buyers, publicists, a whole team, treating a documentary like a hot-ticket scripted release. He frames the old stigma plainly: self-distribution used to signal that no one wanted your film, and has since flipped into a power move that lets a filmmaker hold onto the work and refuse a bad deal. The film self-distributed into more than 220 theaters across 150-plus cities, selling out big houses and playing the cineplex inside the very mall where it happened, and only later did Music Box Films come aboard for digital and the Netflix deal. Having Jesse Eisenberg as a producer and a genuine face of the film, fresh off the awards attention for A Real Pain and out doing Q and As and late-night spots, supplied the kind of awareness most self-released docs never get. None of it was overnight; the film premiered at SXSW back in 2024, earning a first-of-its-kind extra buzz screening, and the success that followed took nearly two years of relentless work to build.
The Constraint Is the Art
The unifying insight is that “perfect conditions” are a myth the gatekeepers benefit from: the permitted space, the proper development path, the distributor who finally validates you. The apartment is a literal monument to ignoring that myth, a home built in the one place no one authorized, and Workman’s whole approach, the independent financing, the self-distribution, the form that deliberately scrambles what a documentary is supposed to be, is the same refusal practiced in another medium. His film belongs beside two he doesn’t name: Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, which scrambles the line between art, prank, and hoax, and Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I, that warm essay on reclaiming value from the discarded margins of a consumer world. The playfulness is not decoration; it is the argument. You make the thing you can make, in the conditions you actually have, in the space nobody gave you, and that constraint is not the obstacle to the art. It is the art, and arguably the only honest place it can come from. The greatest prank ever filmed turns out to be a thesis on how to live and how to make: stop waiting for the room you were promised, and build in the gap.
