Adam Brody plays a grown man still trading on a childhood reputation in The Kid Detective, Evan Morgan's 2020 Canadian comedy-mystery about what happens when the boy wonder stops being a boy and nobody wonders about him anymore.
What is The Kid Detective about?
Abe used to be famous in his small town. As a kid he cracked lost-bicycle cases and schoolyard thefts, got his picture in the local paper and even had an office downtown. Years later he is thirty-one, still in that office, still taking the same tiny jobs, and drinking more than he solves. Then a soft-spoken high-school student walks in with something he has never been handed before: a genuine case. Her boyfriend has been stabbed to death and the police have nothing. Abe takes the job half out of pride and half because he has no idea what else to do with himself, and the investigation forces him to measure the man he became against the prodigy everyone once expected. The film keeps its deadpan jokes about an overgrown kid detective right beside a murder inquiry it treats with real seriousness.
About the cast
Adam Brody carries the film with a rumpled, self-deprecating performance that leans on his comic timing while letting the sadness underneath show through. Sophie Nélisse plays the young client whose earnestness keeps pulling Abe back toward the case, and the ensemble includes Peter MacNeill, Maurice Dean Wint, Kaitlyn Chalmers-Rizzato, Sarah Sutherland, Wendy Crewson and Jonathan Whittaker as the townspeople who remember Abe's glory days with varying patience.
Context & significance
Evan Morgan wrote and directed The Kid Detective, a Canadian production released in 2020. The idea is simple and sturdy: take the precocious child sleuth of countless paperbacks and ask what that person looks like at thirty-one when the cases never got bigger and the admiration dried up. The result is part noir pastiche, part small-town character study. Morgan keeps the tone dry rather than zany, which is why the shift into darker territory in the second half lands as hard as it does. Running a little over a hundred minutes, it is paced like a proper detective story, with clues, interviews and false leads, and it was warmly received as a word-of-mouth discovery.
Watching The Kid Detective on Ktime
The Kid Detective streams on K-Time with a Persian dub, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow Abe's dry narration without reading subtitles. Create a free K-Time account and sign in to start watching; the interface is available in Farsi and the film plays on phone, tablet or television.