Directed by: Harry Bradbeer
Starring: Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin, Louis Partridge, Helena Bonham Carter
Rated PG-13, 123 minutes
During his lifetime, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, just to stop the constant demand from readers for more detective stories. It didn’t work. Doyle eventually brought Holmes back to life, and nearly a century after Doyle’s death, Holmes is still a household name and the demand for stories of Holmesian deduction and wit is still high, from the Guy Ritchie movies starring Robert Downey Jr., to TV shows like “Sherlock” and “Elementary.”
Into this tradition steps “Enola Holmes,” Harry Bradbeer’s (“Fleabag”) adaptation of Nancy Springer’s book series about Sherlock’s little sister (a character never mentioned or alluded to in Doyle’s works). Yet despite the weighty legacy of Doyle’s detective, “Enola Holmes” charges ahead without any reservations. This is not a stately and methodical whodunit like the ones we’re used to, but a radical and youthful adventure. It may be set in the 1880s, but it’s unmistakably a product of the present day.
Enola (Millie Bobby Brown, “Stranger Things”), we learn quickly, isn’t like other girls of the era. Rather than attend finishing school and learn table manners and prepare for marriage, she studies “different things,” as she says. Under the tutelage of her headstrong mother, Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter, “Harry Potter”), Enola has read every book in the house library, filling out her education with activities like archery practice and science experiments with explosive chemicals. She and her mother play tennis indoors, breaking glass and knocking the noses off statues.
Enola is most obsessed, however, with word puzzles. Her own name, she points out, reads “Alone” backwards, and the mystery that follows makes frequent use of similar anagrammatic considerations. The mystery here involves Eudoria, who goes missing on Enola’s 16th birthday. Enola’s older brothers, Sherlock (Henry Cavill, “Man of Steel”) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin, “Adrift”), return to the country house where they were raised, but offer Enola little consolation or help in finding their mother. With nothing but a handful of clues left behind by Eudoria, Enola runs away from home to find her.
If Sherlock is the detective of the family and Mycroft the career bureaucrat, then Enola is the spy—donning elaborate (and occasionally gender-bending) disguises, leaving ciphers in the personals of the daily papers, sneaking into houses and offices and warehouses filled with explosives. The plot thickens when she gets tangled up in the affairs of another runaway, Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge, “Medici”), a young marquess being pursued by a mysterious assassin. Meanwhile, in the background, the House of Lords deliberates over a reform bill that would expand voting rights to women; suffragettes pressure the government to pass the bill, while conservatives drag their feet.
With this last detail, “Enola Holmes” paints itself as not just another trip into the Holmesian fictional universe, but a pointedly feminist expansion of it. A spirit of self-determination drives the movie, matching the heightened political consciousness we all have in 2020. And while some of the storytelling is clumsy, especially toward the beginning, the movie eventually finds its footing and delivers on the promise of its premise. In its most telling scene, a suffragette chides Sherlock for lacking interest in the politics of the case of his missing mother and sister. “You have no interest in changing a world that suits you so well,” she says. Enola’s disappearance, like her mother’s, isn’t just a case to be solved, but something deeper, an act of agency by a woman who refuses to live a life dictated by men.
Purists (and copyright lawyers) may object to the embellishment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s body of work, and were “Enola Holmes” a simplistic re-creation of Sherlock’s mysteries with a touch of “girl power” platitudes, the fan fiction aspect would be off-putting. But “Enola Holmes” is genuine and compelling. Anchored by a charismatic performance by Millie Bobby Brown and a tender, scene-stealing turn from Helena Bonham Carter, “Enola Holmes” is at its best when it focuses our attention on the bonds, spoken and unspoken, between Enola and Eudoria—the bonds between mother and daughter, between fighters in a multigenerational movement. Left on the periphery of the stories of more famous men for so long, they finally have a well-earned moment in the spotlight.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 10/9/20.