99 min | R | October 16, 2020 | Stage 6 Films
Abe Applebaum is the most famous kid detective his small town has ever produced. Two decades later he is thirty-two, drinking through the afternoon, and still running the same sad office his parents pay for. Then a real murder walks in the door.
Abe Applebaum solves his first case at twelve and becomes a local celebrity in his small Ontario town. Adults trust him with missing pets and stolen lunch money. Twenty years later he is thirty-two, hungover, and still running the same detective business out of an office his parents subsidize. A high school girl named Caroline walks in and asks him to find out who murdered her boyfriend. The film dresses itself as a children’s mystery and operates as a neo-noir about a man who peaked before puberty.
Adam Brody plays Abe as a charmer whose charm has curdled into self-pity. He still performs the boy-genius bit because it is the only version of himself the town remembers. Brody lets the desperation leak through the patter. Sophie Nélisse plays Caroline with a flat, guarded affect that reads first as teenage attitude and slowly reveals itself as grief. Tzi Ma plays Mr. Chang, a grieving father, with a stillness the comedy never undercuts. The supporting cast treats Abe as a town mascot, and the contempt underneath the affection is the point.
Evan Morgan writes and directs his first feature with control over a tone that should not hold together. The cinematography keeps the town in flat suburban daylight that makes the noir feel pathetic instead of glamorous. Morgan shoots Abe’s adult investigations with the same earnest framing he gives the childhood flashbacks, and the joke is that nothing has changed. The score leans on a wistful detective theme that sours as the case turns ugly. The editing withholds the weight of the central mystery until late, then lets it land hard. The whimsy is the setup, and the darkness is the punchline.
The film is about the cost of being told you are special before you have done anything to deserve it. Abe coasts for twenty years on a reputation he built as a child, and the real case forces him to be an actual detective for the first time. The answer he uncovers is bleaker than the genre usually permits. Morgan refuses to let the nostalgia win. He builds a comedy around a failed boy genius and then makes him solve a crime no boy should have to.