Emil and the Queer Female Detectives

Even the first names of the child actors reveal the passage of time: In the Kästner adaptation of “Emil and the Detectives” from 1931, the main character Emil and his friend Pony were actually named Rolf and Inge in real life; in the 1954 film they were Peter and Claudia; in the 2001 film Tobias and Anja—and now, in 2026: Nicholas Jonah and Lara Toni.

It’s that time again: film producers have unearthed the brilliantly simple Emil material from Erich Kästner. The children’s book classic was published in 1929, and since then it has been adapted for the big screen several times.

The new film (the wide release launches September 24) gently transports the material into the present-day, the Berlin of today—and it’s an entertaining romp for kids and grownups alike. It also features a cameo by rapper and TikTok sensation Zah1de.

What the nearly century-old novel is about

In the novel “Emil and the Detectives,” the young Emil Tischbein from the provinces pursues, together with new Berlin-based friends, a ruthless thief who stole money during the summer trip to Berlin from him—money that was supposed to go to his grandmother.

In the end, Emil, through clever collaboration with other kids, retrieves the banknotes and, in the process, also hands over to the police a criminal who had long eluded capture.

The new film was shot a year ago

In the role of Emil in the new adaptation is Nicholas Jonah Peter, who is now 14 years old. Filming took place in 2025 during August, September, and October. By his side are, for example, Lara Toni Lüdders (the role of Pony) and Kilian Kasa (the helpful Gustav).
Pony is not Emil’s cousin in 2026, but a strong neighbor child of Berlin grandmother Renate (played by the ever-wonderful Ursula Werner).
The tough urban-girl Pony picks up Emil at the station without him knowing and wonders, “Who looks like a Dorfie here?” The Gustav who had previously appeared in Emil’s life, who calls himself that because his real name is supposedly too complicated for Germans to pronounce, in 2026 does not carry a horn with him as in the novel, but is an ambitious child with a Middle Eastern migration background.

Current Berlin clichés are being teased

The new “Emil” film is a successful Berlin-strewn movie in which contemporary capital-city irritants are casually woven in, including service staff who can’t speak German (“English, please”), the stereotype of particularly crime-prone subway lines (“Did you ride the U8?”), and daytime, scatterbrained scene-goers (“Those aren’t zombies, they’re Druffis”).

Directed by David Dietl, the Los Angeles-born son of director Helmut Dietl (“Kir Royal”); the screenplay was written by Antonia Scheurlen.

While Kästner’s book was a “boys’ novel” with determined youngsters, as people around 1930 liked to say, the film version, almost a century later, is considerably more gender-balanced.

Tuesday is no longer a boy—but also not a girl

The character of Little Tuesday, in the book a wealthy boy who serves as the detectives’ telephone hub with a landline, is now a tech-savvy child with a smartphone who does not clearly identify as boy or girl (played by the boy Bela Louis Plass). Emil himself only has a “kid’s phone”—an old mobile phone without Internet.

To track the crook who calls himself Max Grundeis, the new film quietly outfits him with modern AirPods so he can be located. The nasty thief is played by Merlin Sandmeyer (“Die Discounter”). The actor is known for his distinctive red mustache.

Rather than ordinary bicycles or a scooter, the kids in 2026 also ride on electric scooters, weaving through summer-kissed Kreuzberg. And sometimes several kids share one scooter — tz!

Instead of from Neustadt, Emil is now from Bernburg

In the novel, Emil Tischbein hails from a fictional Neustadt—a German provincial setting, not specified. In the 2026 film, he lives in Bernburg (Saale) in Saxony-Anhalt.

His mother Anna Tischbein (Luise Heyer) is a hairdresser by trade, as in the novel. In the book, the father, a master plumber, died when Emil was five. In the new film the father was a senior flight attendant (Purser) and died a few years ago under unspecified circumstances.

In the 1929 novel, the mother gives the twelve-year-old Emil 140 marks in cash to help his grandmother. By 2026 that amount has grown to “over a thousand euros.”

Emil travels by ICE instead of the old rattling train

In the novel, Emil leaves the train at Berlin’s Zoo station with a string of compartments; in 2026 the film has him traveling on a modern ICE high-speed train and disembarking at Berlin’s gleaming, labyrinthine Hauptbahnhof.

All in all, the new Emil film is a more authentic reinvention than the 2001 version. Twenty-five years ago Jürgen Vogel played the villain. Some aspects of the material were altered and inflated back then in ways that weren’t entirely for the better.

Thus, Emil lived, for example, with his father, who had become unemployed after the reunification; the mother had run away and was living with a new husband in Canada. In Berlin he didn’t visit his grandmother, but the sister of his teacher.

In the new film, which is better than its trailer might suggest, the emphasis is warmly on the original values of Kästner’s book. In other words: a socially realistic, child-on-child portrayal shows how important solidarity, true friendship, courage, and working together to stand up to people who act badly can be.