The Kid Detective

A film set in a small Canadian town. Abe was the town's detective as a child. At twelve he found lost cats and solved thefts at school, and the council gave him an office. The papers wrote about him. Then something happened: a girl disappeared and he could not find her. The case was never closed. He is thirty-two now. The same office is still open but nobody comes; the town treats him as a story from the past. He drinks, he sleeps and takes the occasional small job. One day Caroline, a high school student, comes in. Her boyfriend has been killed and the police are getting nowhere. She trusts him. Abe is looking at a real murder case for the first time and his methods do not work. What he did as a child was a game; this is not. The register is comedy in the first half and goes somewhere else in the second. The narrative takes the pattern of child-detective stories and leaves it in an adult place. Adam Brody plays Abe and Sophie Nélisse plays Caroline. Evan Morgan directed and wrote it; it is his first feature. An interesting production for anyone who likes black humour and mixtures of genre. For a viewer expecting a light comedy, the film darkens markedly in its last section.