THE KID DETECTIVE (15)

AVAILABLE FROM MONDAY ON MAJOR STREAMING PLATFORMS

Almost 20 years ago, Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody) was the cause celebre of the close-knit community of Willowbrook.

As a fresh-faced teenager, Abe (played in flashback by Jesse Noah Gruman) solved dozens of crimes and set up his own detective agency with mayor’s daughter Gracie Gulliver (Kaitlyn Chalmers-Rizzato) as a receptionist.

When Gracie vanished without trace on a walk home from school, Willowbrook expected Abe to unmask the culprit.

He couldn’t and the guilt warped Abe’s glittering future.

Now 32, Abe stills runs the detective agency with a sardonic goth receptionist called Lucy (Sarah Sutherland).

Out of the blue, high school student Caroline (Sophie Nelisse) sombrely enters his office. “Somebody murdered my boyfriend. He was stabbed 17 times,” she discloses.

Abe nervously agrees to take on his first murder case.

The Kid Detective is a delightfully deadpan anthem to doomed youth, which becomes increasingly dark and twisted as desires in the characters’ blackened hearts are revealed. Writer-director Evan Morgan’s genre-bending debut feature is galvanised by the compelling dynamic between Nelisse’s grief-stricken girlfriend and Brody’s fallen wunderkind.

Their offbeat double-act provides flecks of irreverent humour as the plot untangles, with plentiful kinks to keep viewers guessing about what happened to Gracie that fateful day. A script laced with wry humour delights in confounding expectations.

Initially, the tone is more Scooby-Doo than grizzled gumshoe as the prepubescent hero uses logic to crack minor classroom misdemeanours.

When reality bites in the present day, the central character’s wide-eyed, youthful optimism has festered into regret and deep self-loathing. Climactic revelations send a creepily satisfying shudder down the spine.