I couldn’t help but find myself doing a little bit of detective work as this movie started: call it “The Mystery of Why My Past Self Put a Movie Ranked #83 on My Watch List”.  Was it by a director or screenwriter who’d made a movie I liked?  Had someone re­commended it to me?  Actually, it’s entirely possible that some­one recommended it to me and I’ve forgotten, but it’s also pos­sible that I added it myself after seeing (and then, after adding the movie to the list, immediately forgetting) the premise.  See, this is a riff on Encyclopedia Brown, and one of the most popular things on my site is a little story I wrote, ulp, almost twenty years ago now called “Wikipedia Brown”.  Not only that, but for over thirty years now I’ve had an idea kicking around for a book called Dictionary Dickinson that would start off as a very straightforward Encyclopedia Brown clone and then gradually change genre to end up in a very dark place.  That turns out to be more or less what this is.  But I don’t mind being scooped on this one, because, one, I had a quarter-century lead on this filmmaker and never got around to making the idea a reality, and two, it is unlikely that I would have done as well as this guy because this movie is fucking great.  The idea that there could be eighty-two movies from 2020 better than this is ludicrous to me.  I will be shocked if there’s even one.

To expand a bit on the premise: Willowbrook, Ontario, a town about three hundred kilometers north of Toronto, had the aver­age number of crimes for a community of its size.  But around the turn of the millennium, many of those crimes were solved by a twelve-year-old mastermind, Abe Applebaum!  Who stole the cash box for the school fundraiser?  He put the clues together!  Who changed the time on the city clock tower?  He had the an­swer!  With the able assistance of the mayor’s daughter Gracie, young Abe opened up his own office, and the waiting room was packed with people who hoped he would take their cases!

…And then Gracie was kidnapped.  And Abe couldn’t solve the case.  Twenty years later, he’s a disheveled loser⁠—still a detec­tive, but the cases he gets are “Where’s my cat?” and “Did this guy in my class really practice with the Mets last summer?”  Then, one day, a teenage girl walks into his office.  Her boyfriend has been murdered.  It’s been two weeks and the police have no leads.  She wants to hire him.

What first made me think this movie was turning out to be some­thing special was its dark comedy: it’s not the sort of movie that rattles off jokes, but deadpan humor is densely woven into the texture of the film⁠—the way conversations unfold, the timing and delivery of lines like “Three.”, the little throwaway lines (“I can wash it off in a week”), the odd details (e.g., the way Calvin and Jackie spend their spare time)… I wasn’t laughing, but I was shaking my head with admiration.  And then real pathos and genuine insight about life gradually creep into the story, and by the end I felt like I’d seen a real tour de force.

And apparently it made less than $400,000.  And Evan Morgan hasn’t made any other movies.  Goddammit.  Why can’t we have nice things?

Addendum:  It turns out that I added this movie to my list based on a recommendation by Adam Thompson that arrived out of the blue on 2021.1024.  Well, my fellow Adam, you absolutely nailed that one.  Thanks!!  I should probably be following your lists in­stead of those of the Skandies voters.

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