Enola Holmes

The Detective Who Looks Back

There is something inherently transgressive about the way Enola Holmes catches your eye. In the traditional Sherlockian universe—that fog-drenched, pipe-smoke-choked canon of Arthur Conan Doyle—the detective is a creature of distance. He is an enigma to be observed, a brain to be admired from afar. But in Harry Bradbeer’s 2020 adaptation, the fourth wall is not just broken; it’s dismantled with the cheerful abandon of a teenager deciding that the rules of the house no longer apply to her. When Millie Bobby Brown looks directly into the lens, she’s not just narrating; she’s pulling us into a conspiracy of two. It feels like she’s asking if we’re keeping up, or perhaps wondering if we’re as easily fooled as the men in her life.



This, of course, is the signature flourish of Bradbeer, whose work on *Fleabag* turned direct address into a form of psychic survival. Here, the technique serves a different master. In London, the mystery is a labyrinthine game of wits. For Enola, it’s a chaotic coming-of-age story that occasionally forgets it’s supposed to be solving a crime. And that’s fine. I am not sure the "whodunit" elements—the kidnapping of a young lord, the parliamentary intrigue—actually matter that much. When the film tries to lean into its procedural roots, the gears grind a bit. It’s at its best when it stops trying to be a detective movie and just hangs out in the messiness of being an inconvenient, brilliant young woman in a world designed to put her in a corset.

The film has a restless, frenetic energy that captures the feeling of being young and under-estimated. It’s colorful, loud, and does not sit still long enough for the Victorian scenery to feel dusty or museum-like. Some critics, like *The Guardian’s* Peter Bradshaw, rightly pointed out that it "is a very busy film," and he’s not wrong. It rushes. It’s breathless. But there is a deliberate choice in that acceleration; it feels like the internal state of a girl whose mind is moving three steps faster than the adults around her.



Then there is the matter of the brother. Henry Cavill’s Sherlock is a compelling pivot for an actor who has spent much of his career occupying the space of the stoic, iron-jawed hero. Watching him here, I was struck by the restraint. He is famously a mountain of a man, yet he makes himself small. He does not play Sherlock as the arrogant genius we’re used to; he plays him as a man who is genuinely, perhaps even slightly painfully, surprised by his own capacity for affection. When he stands in the doorway, his broad shoulders filling the frame but his posture softened, you see a man realizing that his sister is not a mystery to be solved, but a person to be known. It’s a quiet performance, often overshadowed by Brown’s relentless kineticism, but it’s the anchor that keeps the movie from floating away entirely.

I am not entirely sure the film’s conclusion lands with the weight it wants. The mystery of the mother, played by Helena Bonham Carter with a delightful, eerie twinkle, feels like it’s being held back for a potential sequel—a dangling thread that reminds us we’re in the age of franchise-building, even if the film itself feels like a singular, spirited romp.



Whether that, or the sometimes cartoonish editing, bothers you probably depends on your tolerance for whimsy. Personally, I found it hard to stay cynical. There is a certain joy in watching a character dismantle the expectations of her era not with a grand revolutionary speech, but with a series of well-placed punches and a biting wit. Enola does not save the world, and she does not rewrite history. She just demands a place in it. By the time the credits rolled, I was not thinking about the logic of the plot or the historical accuracy of the costumes. I was just thinking about that look in her eye—that direct, challenging gaze that suggests the mystery is not the crime at all. It’s what she’s going to do next.