A winding and at-times enraging medical exposé, Grace Hughes-Hallett’s feature debut “The Secret of Me” is stylistically straightforward, but emotionally self-assured. Although it has a litany of subjects, it unravels its secondary stories by connecting them to a central character: a girl named Kristi from Baton Rouge, who would go on to discover shocking secrets about her upbringing as a teenager in the 1990s. In the present, various interviewees recall Kristi wistfully, including a bearded, middle-aged man named Jim. Minutes into the movie, Jim reveals that he is, or rather once was, Kristi — and the obvious conclusion one might draw does not apply. “This is not a transgender story,” he says.

On its surface, the movies shares some structural and thematic similarities with Tim Wardle’s “Three Identical Strangers,” which Hughes-Hallet produced. Both are nature vs. nurture docs about adults discovering shocking medical histories and malpractice dating back to before their births.