The Kid Detective
Dir: Evan Morgan (1hr 37mins) (15)
★★★★
Its Disneyesque title is misleading – doubtless intentionally so – because although this film starts out lightly, it gets stranger and darker, said Wendy Ide in The Observer, becoming first an “astringently bleak” comedy and finally something approaching a “howl of existential despair”. As a precocious 12-year-old, Abe Applebaum was the eponymous sleuth, celebrated in his small town for his role in solving petty local mysteries. But when a girl went missing, he was unable to rescue her – much denting his youthful confidence. As a grown man (Adam Brody), he stews resentfully “in the shadow of his hot-shot younger self”, his private detective business limping along on “missing cat cases and pity”. Then a teenager called Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) gives him a serious case to crack – the murder of her boyfriend by an unknown assailant.
Brody was “beloved” in The O.C., but hasn’t done much since, so his casting in a film about fading fame seems apt, said Tomris Laffly in Variety. He expresses Abe’s “droll bitterness” terrifically, while Nélisse is “heart-rending” as Caroline, and the film movingly portrays the “sibling-like bond” that develops between the pair as they pursue the investigation that takes in drugs, shady locals and more. Much of the film is like “a late ’90s indie”, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian, dozily charming but offputtingly slight. It is worth holding out for the reveal of “the bigger, bleaker picture”, however. The shift in perspective is slightly too abrupt, but it’s audacious and undeniably “disquieting”. In cinemas now in Scotland and Wales. Released in England in December.