Movie Review - Enola Holmes

Director Harry Bradbeer recently won two Emmy Awards for his work on Fleabag in 2019. He also worked on two other, highly-acclaimed TV series, that of Killing Eve and Ramy. The dark or really awkward sense of humor demonstrated in those aforementioned shows is a little bit reflected in this feature. That sensibility helps to keep this film engaging for the most part. Writer Jack Thorne won the Tony Award for his work on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in 2018, which is a stage play that focuses a lot on the relative of a famous literary character. This makes Thorne seemingly the perfect person to pen this film, which is also about the relative of a famous literary character. In this case, that character is Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1880's. Thorne is adapting a young-adult or YA novel by Nancy Springer about the titular relative and Thorne seems pretty faithful to the source material. Having not read the novel, I can't say for sure, if my issue is a problem with the source material or Thorne's screenplay, but there are two things at play here and the focus on one of those things comes to the detriment of the other.

Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things and Godzilla: King of the Monsters) stars as Enola Holmes, the 16-year-old sister to the famous Sherlock Holmes, a well-known detective, scientist, violinist, swordsman and pugilist. Even though Sherlock left home to become said detective when Enola was very young, her mother raised Enola in such a way that she's essentially the female teenage version of Sherlock. However, she doesn't seem to have any aspirations to become an actual detective herself at the beginning. She lives in a fairly decent estate in England, 1884, with her widowed mother who apparently is her best friend. She's content on hanging out with her mother on that estate with no seeming career goals. Things change when on the day of her 16th birthday, her mother disappears.

Henry Cavill (Man of Steel and Mission: Impossible - Fallout) co-stars as Sherlock Holmes, the older brother to Enola. He returns home following his mother's disappearance. He takes it on as if it were one of his detective cases. He investigates and tries to find his mother. Except, we never really see him doing much of anything or what he does do, it's at a distance because the film is told from Enola's point of view and she's kept at a distance from him, mainly because he keeps her at arm's length, as he behaves as though he doesn't really care about her or have any emotions at all.

Enola asks Sherlock if she can help or if he'll help her, but she doesn't get far or anywhere really with him. Therefore, she goes off on her own to investigate and try to find their mother herself. Her brothers don't agree with her doing this, so they set out to stop her and bring her back home. This journey for Enola to find her mother and her brothers trying to find her is compelling. Deconstructing their family dynamics, specifically in how women are oppressed and marginalized within families, is very compelling. It's also so when we see how Sherlock can be as patriarchal and sexist as anyone else.

Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Snow White and the Huntsman) also co-stars as Mycroft Holmes, the older brother to both Sherlock and Enola. Speaking of being patriarchal and sexist, Mycroft appears to be the worst of the lot. He doesn't care what Enola wants. He simply wants to send her to a finishing school, which is there to teach women how to be wives, or subservient to men. As a result of his mother's disappearance, Enola becomes his ward or he's her legal guardian. He doesn't seem to want her to continue living in their family home. He just wants to marry her off, so he doesn't have to be concerned or responsible.

Unfortunately, the narrative is diverted from really delving more into the family dynamics of Enola, Sherlock and Mycroft. In addition to investigating her mother's disappearance, Enola gets involved with another missing person's case. Actually, it's a case that's about a teenage runaway like her. Louis Partridge plays Tewksbury, the son of an English Lord and member of the Parliament. Tewksbury is a teenage botanist whose parents want him to join the military but he didn't want to do so. He ran off and now an assassin is trying to kill him. Enola has to save Tewksbury and figure out why the assassin is after him. Besides setting up some action scenes for Enola, this case involving Tewksbury felt extraneous and not as engaging or compelling as Enola's family dynamics.

I didn't care about the Tewksbury stuff mostly because the film doesn't do the requisite things to fill out why his departure from home and his assassination attempt should mean anything. It's later revealed that his problem is connected to greater political issues. Yet, the film doesn't do enough to make me care about those greater political issues. It's established that it's about a vote over a Reform Bill, but other than the usual, Conservative-versus-Liberal, right-versus-left, generic stuff, the film doesn't drill deeper into the substance of the so-called Reform Bill. We never really get why people would be for it or against it.

It's fine as a setup for a Victorian era version of Veronica Mars, but even that modern TV series would do more with the parent-child relationship than this film does with its parent-child relationship. Helena Bonham Carter (The Crown and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street) plays Enola's mom. The film only utilizes her as an idea, a rather mythic one, and the film never fleshes her out or makes her feel like a real person with whom we should also connect. She's a MacGuffin for the most part.

Rated PG-13 for some violence.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 3 mins.

Available on Netflix.