Evan Morgan's The Kid Detective

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¹ If your submission doesn't comply with the category, I will buy a Japanese pull saw and train myself to pick locks, disarm alarms, etc. I’ll be like Catwoman (the Anne Hathaway version that does cool backflips to exit tall buildings undetected), but with a Japanese pull saw. Then, I’ll come to your town and enter (stealthily, in the dead of night) every single restaurant and office building. I’ll take my Japanese pull saw and cut a quarter of an inch off of one leg of each single table, counter, and cabinet I find. If the legs are metal, I’ll pull out my handy dandy angle grinder and do the same. I’ll do every table, counter, and cabinet in your house as well. The result: everything will wobble. Every single piece of furniture in your life will wobble. You will never be able to rely on furniture to stand without wobbling. Unless you buy a bunch of napkins and fold them and repair the entire town. Which is like, a bunch of work. You’d be like the Batman (the Christian Bale version) of repairing wobbly furniture. One day, while repairing the furniture, you’ll run into me. I’ll be dressed as Catwoman holding a Japanese pull saw and an angle grinder. You’ll see my butt in leather tights and it will simply be too much for you: you’ll fall for me immediately. I’ll even let us have a “will they, won’t they” moment. But then, I’ll do a backflip and escape before you have a chance to find out who I am. And you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what could have been, repairing wobbly furniture, dressed as Batman like a complete weirdo. So, ya know. Please follow the category.

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A once-celebrated kid detective, now 31, gets his first murder case.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

→ Noir comedy. The film juxtaposes classic noir storytelling devices (e.g., the detective narrates the story alongside a smokey score) with pitch black comedy.

→ Mysteries. The case in this film is genuinely well-crafted.

→ People out of their depth.² When unqualified people do things they shouldn’t do.

² I present to you three examples of people in hypothetical situations that I’d consider to be out of their depth, despite being the world record holders in adjacent categories. (1) Luke Roberts of the United Kingdom, the Guinness World Record holder for fastest time to complete the board game Operation (12.68 seconds) doing open-heart surgery on a human being. (2) Martin Ströby of Sweden, the Guinness World Record holder for most matches held in nose (81), running the Macy’s July 4th fireworks show. (3) Diana Armstrong of the United States, the Guinness World Record holder for longest fingernails on a pair of hands (42ft 10.4 in) giving a manicure to my (finicky) grandmother.

I was once a kid who owned the 1997 Guinness World Record book. I’ve spent years as an adult completely unaware that Guinness has a website with a records showcase. It’s okay if you’re disappointed in me, for I am as well.

I think I’m done here.

What I liked about it.

I can’t recall the names of the kid detective books I read as a child. It wasn’t Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys or Encyclopedia Brown. I’m certain I read the kid detective genre when I was young because, if you were once young, then you did.

I know what you’re thinking. That I don’t recall what I read because it was a vapid imitation of the originals. That I was a young boy with the clunky literary taste of an infant drooling over crunchy black-and-white contrast books.

Erudite as you are, you’re most certainly aware of Lucy Andrew’s revelatory 243 page entry in Critical Approach to Children’s Literature, entitled The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood.

And so, you already know that the child detective archetype can traced back 1865-1866 editions of “penny dreadfuls” in Britain. To a character called Ernest Keen from an edition entitled The Boy Detective.

The market appeal of these stories — where kid detectives like Encyclopedia Brown sleuth through the margins of society and solve quirky mysteries like the case of the missing marching band — is well-proven.

Therefore, filmmakers have, more than once, imagined what might happen if those child detectives had to cope when the sheen of childhood is dulled into the gloss-less gray of adulthood.

And while there will always be a place in my heart for Mystery Team — a wonderfully adolescent example of this sort of film — there’s not much quite like Evan Morgan’s The Kid Detective.

Adam Brody (The O.C., Nobody Wants This) co-stars in this two-hander with the well-capable Sophie Nélisse (Yellowjackets).

Writer-director Evan Morgan’s film unfolds like classic noir — complete with a smokey, meandering, jazz-forward score (e.g. tip-toeing bass, minatory piano, sparse flute) and some “I’m too old for this shit” narration from the film’s titular detective.

The set gives the impression of an afterschool mystery special. Or rather, the empty shell of one, years after the production shuttered.

Morgan’s script is darkly comedic and also home to a genuinely surprising mystery. Most admirable is his willingness to shift tones without warning, perhaps by design.

This forces the viewer, I suppose, to think about what exactly they are laughing at — a broken man exasperated that his life failed to meet the grand expectations he and his parents had for it.

Brody underlines every note of dry humor with a tired, ashamed performance (this is a compliment). Sophie Nélisse plays “the dame” archetype — the lead detective’s unlikely partner in solving the crime — to perfection.

I want to get ahead of something you might think when you reach the end of the film. That the solved mystery feels clunky, like the conclusion of a Scooby Doo episode, where the criminal explains their motives and their how-I-got-away-with-it-for-so-long guide.

To criticize this is fine with me. But I’d like to humbly remind you, The Kid Detective is a film about what it’s like to live a life that hasn’t met your expectations. And, perhaps, what it’s like when it finally does meet your expectations.

And so, my perspective: when Abe Applebaum, boy detective, finally gets his Scooby Doo confession — in the exact style he might have expected all those years ago as a mere child — what does it really feel like?

The very well made point, perhaps, is that solving the case doesn’t always feel good. That there’s something dimly silly about a life spent chasing after something.

I invite you to imagine the sensation of walking up a flight of stairs. But forever. Only seeking to reach the top floor. You push and you push and your legs ache. When you finally reach the top, you see in front of you, the same amount of stairs going down.

There is no top. The stairs are the stairs. Just enjoy being on the stairs.

Enjoy the film.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

→ It was almost a mini-series. Evan Morgan approached Adam Brody about starring in The Kid Detective in 2012 (8 years before its eventual release). They pitched the independent film for 5 or 6 years with no success. They started to think about cutting it up into a mini-series to get more meetings, but before doing so, they got financed.

→ Abe wears a bruise for most of the film as a nod to a classic detective film. Adam Brody: “And somewhat in a nod to Chinatown, which is the high watermark for the detective genre, but also to set the character, we decided he's gonna have this [bruise]. He's gonna wear it real. If you have this cut or this punch or this bruise, you would have it for a month.”

One great line of dialogue from the film.

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