(And since the film has populated its small-town story with only one other subplot, it’s not hard to guess what’s going on.) Lavin has fun portraying an aging free spirit who’s seen her share of adventures she talks of facing down communism and hints at a lifetime of revolving-door lovers. Flora is worried she might have been visited by the ghosts of two lovers who were allegedly buried alive in the walls of the building decades ago, but Nancy, ever the materialist, is convinced there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Nancy offers to help out local eccentric Flora (Linda Lavin, a welcome face to those of us who grew up watching Alice) who has been hearing and seeing mysterious things in her house. The actual mystery in Hidden Staircase isn’t particularly gripping it’s a kind of haunted-house throwback that brings some lightly gothic flair to the otherwise contemporary setting. Now, the story starts off with Nancy and her friends George (played by Zoe Renee) and Bess (Mackenzie Graham) using various disguises and technological know-how to exact revenge (or, as Nancy terms it, “restorative justice”) on a preening, entitled jock who posted a doctored, humiliating video of Bess online.īut soon the Nancy Drew part of the Nancy Drew story kicks in. The opening scenes give us extended shots of Nancy ( It’s Sophia Lillis) skateboarding down the street of a small town to the accompaniment of Emily Bear’s pop song “More Than Just a Girl” - all so drawn out that it’s hard not to feel that the filmmakers are insistently announcing, “ See!? This is not your grandmother’s Nancy Drew!” Which, fair: The character has obviously been reimagined a bit for 2019.
Maybe that’s why there have been no less than three attempts to turn her into a TV series over the past five years - each trying to redefine Nancy and her milieu in a slightly more contemporary way.Īt first, you might worry that a new, very loose adaptation of one of the Titian-haired sleuth’s best-known titles, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (it was published in 1930, and there was even a film of it made back in 1938), might collapse under the weight of such demands. “Like the thirties starlets programmed by the Hollywood star system to radiate glamour, power, and searing perfection, Nancy is a fundamentally collaborative project who embodies distinct, often contradictory visions for how a super-girl should look and behave,” wrote Isabel Ortiz in the Paris Review a few years ago. And her image and identity have over the years served as a canvas against which our culture reflects its priorities. She’s had film series, multiple TV iterations, and extremely popular video games, all the while continuing to sell millions of books. As a pop-cultural phenomenon, Nancy Drew has proven to be both resilient and adaptable - more, it seems, than her fellow child detectives the Hardy Boys, or my beloved Three Investigators.