What is it that makes a slight, inconsequential movie like “The Kid Detective” tap on your bedroom windows to keep you awake at night thinking about it? It’s a shaggy dog story of sorts about Abe Applebaum, the smart-arse former Kid Detective who solved over 200 cases in the network TV town of Willowbrook, ranging from a missing fundraiser box to a stolen time capsule. Abe is the bastard lovechild of Doogie Howser MD and The Red Hand Gang, a precocious brat who wonders if he is “the smartest person in the world” and conducts his business from a tree house and then a dubiously funded office. Everyone loves him, he’s on first-name terms with the townsfolk and has a lifetime supply of ice cream to boot.
Years later, Abe is washed up, addled with drugs and booze, sporting an Elliott Gould hairstyle from “The Long Goodbye” and haunted by the disappearance of his assistant Gracie. The opening scene of Gracie standing opposite a silent car on a leafy suburb is a haunting prologue that conjures up the ice cream van scene in “Assault on Precinct 13.” We can’t shake it throughout the film, it lingers, an apparition that scars Abe’s golden childhood.
“I used to be loved”, he laments. “I was a Kid Detective.”
What happens when a child prodigy crashes and burns under the weight of adult expectation? When adults devolve all adult responsibility to a minor and blame him for the catastrophic consequences?
Willowbrook, once his kingdom, is now his prison; an autumnal Albion wilting, fading from its symbiotic relationship with its prince lost in his deep melancholy. Once-friendly store owners glower with quiet disdain, the ice-cream vendor resentful for making an oath with a failure. Abe skulks between his apartment and his office, both steeped in malaise and worn-out memorabilia of the past. His tragedy is played not so much as a black comedy but more like a rolling grey fog quietly smirking us to death. Redemption comes in the form of the doe-eyed, earnest, high-school girl, Caroline. Her boyfriend (of 3 months) has been stabbed 17 times and she needs closure.
Abe makes his inquiries in the high school, storming through neo noir corridors into bars, quizzing locals and relatives, leaving windows ajar to break into later and leaving parents aghast at his hackneyed attempts at sensitivity. Mysterious cars follow him and the kids on the stoop ridicule him. An extended sequence where Abe hides in a bedroom closet (in America all closets have slats to spy through) is excruciatingly suspenseful, what was once cute and adorable as a 12-year-old is now sordid and tawdry as a man-child. And then the film turns pitch black as an 80s kitsch kid’s programme finally catches up with the bleak reality of 21st century America in the death throes of Trumpism.
So, what elevates “The Kid Detective” to an existential minor work is an arch, sombre, knowing, performance from Adam Brody as Abe. By the end of the film, we finally realise the crushing weight of expectation Abe has faced and the terrifying havoc wreaked on his soul. This isn’t a film that has a nod and a wink and a group laugh as the end credits start to roll, but a film that deals with childhood trauma, the trauma of losing a friend, and the trauma of possibly finding them again. The trauma of finally accepting that it wasn’t your fault.