The Little Things (2021)

The Little Things arrives as a relic of a different development era: a screenplay drafted in 1993, passed among directors, and dusted off nearly three decades later. It plays as a neo-noir procedural set in 1990, complete with a haunted detective, a taunting suspect, and a great deal of weather. Denzel Washington carries the thing with the weariness of a man who has seen too much, and Jared Leto slouches through the frame as a greasy question mark. It topped the domestic box office for a weekend and then evaporated. The Golden Trailer Awards named it Best Drama Poster, which feels like the correct altitude for the entire enterprise.

For the classification ledger, the film offers exactly one entry of note. Washington headlines, and the supporting cast includes Michael Hyatt, Natalie Morales, and Isabel Arraiza, assembled without ceremony or announcement. The film never pauses to congratulate itself for this. It is a genre picture that happens to be cast well, and it treats that fact as unremarkable, which is either a quiet virtue or an absence of ambition, depending on the mood of the auditor.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank. Women appear as victims, witnesses, and the grieving, and the film offers no critique of the male world that produces them. Race goes unmentioned despite a Black lead in a police procedural. There is no economic grievance, no environmental conscience, no body-positive messaging, and no diagnostic framing of Sparma's oddness, which the film presents as plain menace. The screenplay never stops to lecture. It is too busy being moody. The old-fashioned thriller can still be made, it turns out, and it can be made without asking anything of the audience beyond attention. We score it accordingly.

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