I watched this at home on BluRay from my public library. The CW network has a darker, young adult Nancy Drew weekly TV series so I watched this one to compare what is done with Nancy as a 16-yr-old vs a young adult.
In 1938 and 1939 four Nancy Drew movies were made, one of them had this same name. It involved a house that someone was trying to get the occupants, two old spinster sisters, to leave. Key to solving the mystery was a hidden staircase in the old house.
Cute freckled Sophia Lillis is Nancy Drew in this modern version. In the extras the actress herself calls this an origin story although that might not have been the intent. Her mother has died, she and her attorney dad move from Chicago to a fictional community, River Heights. There a company is trying to establish a railway line through the town and Nancy's dad is one of those fighting it for the sake of the community. That angers some who have a lot at stake financially and that causes the tension in the story. And a mystery for Nancy to solve.
So the story involves Nancy getting in trouble, enough so she has to do community service. In spite of that she still manages to work on solving the mystery and it does indeed involve the discovery of a hidden staircase in the home of an old grand aunt of one of her classmates. But the plot of this one is quite different from the 1939 movie of the same name.
Considering what it is, I found it to be suitably entertaining. At one point I was impressed that they actually broke into a lab and used chromatography to identify myristicin, a hallucinogenic chemical derived from nutmeg. The Nancy Drew of 1939 didn't have a skateboard, nor a cell phone, and didn't post things to social media. Nor did she have access to security video. A lot has changed in 80 years.
