“It’s difficult to accept the difference between who you are in your head and who you are in the world.”

Anthony’s rating: Surprisingly filled with quality

Anthony’s review: I honestly did not know what to expect from The Kid Detective when I saw the poster pop online back during the year of the plague. I was hoping it would be a Canadian Canadian movie, not a shameful attempt at emulating American ones (no offence to my homies Yves Simoneau & Erik Canuel, but if you wanna do movies like the Yanks then move down south as Denis Villeneuve did).

I have to say, my hopes were fulfilled and if I’d had any expectations they would have been blown away. If anything, it deconstructs and criticizes American whodunits and shows the hidden aspects of it rather than try to sheepishly copy them.

Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody) used to be a kind of beloved mascot in his small town due to his premature investigative prowess. Before he could even drive, he already had his private detective agency, complete with a downtown office where, for some loose change, he would solve kid-level mysteries. But after a teen girl close to him disappeared and juvenile Abe failed to solve such a real case, his life went sideways rather than forward.

Now thirty-something, Abe still clings to his amateur-sleuth practice while the world has moved on. He still has his downtown office and still claims his free-for-life ice cream from the local parlour given to him back when he was small and cute, even though he’s now more pathetic than anything.  However, one day though he gets hired for an actual, bona fide case: A young woman wants him to find who stabbed her boyfriend 17 times and left his dead body in a ditch. Can Abe finally grow up enough to be the man he dreamed to be as a kid and solve all that needs to be solved?

Right off the bat, The Kid Detective strikes the viewer for NOT being striking. American audiences will see in it a patched-up TV pilot that failed to find a series order, while Canadians will see a character study that cynically uses dark comedy to paint a picture of childhood trauma. Because a trauma is what Abe truly has to deal with: An entire town enabled him to live out a fantasy, then shamed him when he faced the very loud crash of reality.

A very masterful restraint from headliner Brody avoids clichés of a disheveled and depressed P.I. while exploring why they became such clichés. Like when a teen informant sends Abe on a wild goose chase, he comes back to trounce the kid in a manner so awkward and untrained even Bogart must have let out a sympathetic chuckle from the grave. Brody absolutely nails this delicate balance of slapstick and sombre drama, and takes this small movie to another level.

Neither a thriller nor a comedy, the film offers great if simple moments of pathos that surprisingly remain while suddenly exploding into a dark climax. It matters little how many ex machinas it took for older Abe to fulfill his younger self’s promise. Once he does solve the case, it neither feels like victory nor defeat — it feels like coming head-to-head with the consequences of pain too-long buried.

In that, this low-cost production rises above any that copped-out of being released in a year filled with nothing BUT anxiety. After all, PTSD isn’t reserved for battlefield soldiers; it affects everyone who lives through a trauma, and letting a child put the weight of the world on his own shoulders leaves him with deep scars.

A very comfortable cast of players from the North was assembled to surround American boy Brody, including a growing Sophie Nelisse (who broke-out in Oscar darling The Book Thief) as Abe’s latest client, a gorgeously-aging Wendy Crewson (seriously, the older she gets the more beautiful she is) as Abe’s overprotective mother, and respected veteran Peter MacNeill in a performance that left me mouth agape. All of them excel in allowing the lead to shine.

Adam Brody, in an ironically sober tour de force (his character is always drinking or snorting, yet never feels like a drunkard or junkie) carries the whole thing solidly on his shoulders. The film’s concluding shot alone is a masterclass of writer, director, and lead actor all perfectly understanding the subject they tackled.

Watching The Kid Detective a second time, I couldn’t help being reminded of investigation dramedies for the whole family that Canadian television does so well yet rarely does anymore, where a character resolves their lives alongside a mystery, like Danger Bay, Seeing Things, The Edison Twins, or Due South. This is probably why so many will experience the aforementioned feeling of it looking like an aborted small-screen project. But I do invite any viewer to watch it the way I did: no expectation, and hope it’s good. Because it is.