Secret Mall Apartment
February 3, 2026
BLU-RAY DISC REVIEW:
Music Box;
Documentary;
Box Office $0.85 million;
$29.99 DVD, $34.99 Blu-ray;
Not rated.
The engrossing documentary Secret Mall Apartment depicts an act of quiet rebellion presented as a profound statement of artistic expression.
The story involves a group of eight friends in Rhode Island who spent four years setting up a hidden living space within the Providence Place Mall and recording the experience with crude video cameras for their own amusement.
The ringleader of the group was Michael Townsend, a street artist who specialized in underground displays and murals for charity using colored tape. He and his friends were disenfranchised by the gentrification of a dilapidated factory area of Providence, Rhode Island, which was cleared out to build the mall. In 2003, a commercial built around the idea of living in a mall inspired he and his friends to actually attempt to see how long they could spend living in the new mall without being caught.
Townsend discovered a dead zone in the architecture, and the group conspired to furnish it as a hangout in between the dusty cinder blocks, somehow moving in a couch, TV, PlayStation 2 and some shelving units into the space without being caught. At one point, they even covertly constructed a new wall to close off the space with a locked door to which only they had the keys.
The documentary features interviews with all the friends reflecting on why they decided to pursue the secret apartment, and how they kept upping the ante on what they could actually do to the place to make it livable. Some spent weeks at a time sleeping there.
The subterfuge lasted until 2007, when mall security discovered the ruse and shut it down. Townsend had envisioned expanding the project to add wood flooring and plumbing, but was caught showing off the place to another artist friend, and was subsequently banned from the mall (admirably taking the full fall for the stunt without implicating any of his other friends).
Townsend resisted allowing a movie of the experience to be made until meeting with director Jeremy Workman for a project to be produced by Jesse Eisenberg that would tie in the mall apartment scheme with the friend groups’ wider artistic endeavors. But was the secret mall project truly performance art, or just youthful impudence?
In addition to the retrospective interviews, the film uses the low-res footage filmed by the friends, as well as reenactments of events using a replica of the apartment built on a soundstage.
The film oversteps a bit trying to wedge political themes into the narrative that play more like virtue signaling to make an act of youthful tomfoolery more profound than perhaps it really was. But the core subject remains fascinating regardless. The effort plays like a precursor to the plethora of stealth camping videos that have proved to be a popular niche on YouTube, chronicling efforts to sleep overnight in disguised trucks or dumpsters or other disguised locations.
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Secret Mall Apartment is now streaming on Netflix, but the Blu-ray Disc release includes more than an hour of bonus materials, many of which play into the artistic subtext being pushed by the films’ subjects. A deleted scenes compilation, consisting mostly of the original low-res footage shot between 2003 and 2005, runs about 15 minutes and includes a lot of discussions among the friends about how the apartment could be considered art, even if the intent was just as an inside joke between the friends and the footage to document their shared experience was never meant to be seen by outsiders.
The most significant of the extras is a 25-minute discussion between Eisenberg and Townsend recorded in August 2025 during the height of the films’ promotional campaign, as they discuss the apartment in relation to wider themes of commerce’s influence over society.
Also interesting is the eight-and-a-half-minute “The Mall and the Movie,” which chronicles the promotional campaign for the movie that took place at the movie theater at the very mall where the secret apartment existed. The mall also built a replica of the apartment for a photo op, and unbanned Townsend after 17 years so he could participate. Of course, the mall itself is on the verge of bankruptcy, so it’s not like continuing to hold a grudge would do them any good.
Townsend’s artistic side is shown in a six-minute featurette of one of his charity jobs putting up a tape-art mural in Mobile, Alabama.
Rounding out the extras are an 11-and-a-half-minute montage of Q&A sessions with Workman about making the film; a minute-long time lapse video of the secret apartment replica between built on a soundstage and subsequently dismantled; a two-minute video of Eisenberg reading Letterboxd user reviews of the film; a two-minute montage of photos of marquees from various North American theaters showing the film; plus the film’s two-minute theatrical trailer and a four-and-a-half minute compilation of additional promo spots.