Crime, Love, and Soda.
2026 · 19m
Directed by Ben Langford
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
A black-and-white noir comedy about Detective Edgar Wickley, a young man who looks sixteen but works, talks, and dresses like a hardboiled 19th-century detective.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A teenager larping as a 19th-century gumshoe detective in a noir-comedy wrapper—it's aggressively stupid in exactly the way consensus audiences will hate and I'll defend at every table. Langford's not trying to deconstruct noir or comment on anything; he's just committed the bit so hard it becomes genuinely weird.
The conceit sits uneasily between pastiche and satire, and while the formal commitment to black-and-white and genre vocabulary is clear, the film risks collapsing into novelty without the tonal architecture to justify its own premise. The theatrical register needed deeper grounding in either tradition or subversion.
The entire film hinges on whether you buy the performance—a kid holding a hardboiled detective persona with complete seriousness—and Langford knows it; that choice to commit without winking is what keeps this from being a sketch and makes it actually land as something stranger and more specific than the premise promises.
Reviews
With the heart and fervour of a college stage production, the film charms you almost immediately. The writing is neat, it gives you the detective plot just as it serves you with all the excesses of its fans.