Teenage sleuths date back to the days of "The Hardy Boys" and "Nancy Drew," but unlike those literary icons, the high schoolers who set out to solve a mystery in Mari Asato's "Hyouka" do not perform thrilling deeds of detection and derring-do.
Based on Honobu Yonezawa's 2001 novel, the film is instead realistically small-scale and low-key, while its hero is the most reluctant detective imaginable.
High school freshman Hotaro Oreki (Kento Yamazaki) is a born cynic and loner who hates expending unnecessary energy and wants to be what he calls a "gray" presence on the social fringes. So "no" to sports and other strenuous activities and "yes" to only one friend: the impishly grinning, formidably bright Satoshi (Amane Okayama).