1
Oct
2020
Enola Holmes

Enola Holmes

Abandoned by their mother, feisty teenager Enola Holmes is made the ward of mean-spirited brother Mycroft, and Sherlock is powerless to intervene. With Mycroft determined to beat the free-spirit that their mother has instilled in her, Enola sets to investigate the disappearance of her mother with or without their help.

…is enjoyable fun provided you accept the fact, that this is not a Sherlock Holmes story but a comedy built on its foundations.

Produced by Millie Bobby Brown and directed by Harry Bradbeer who helmed has helmed both Fleabag and Killing Eve to awards success, Enola Holmes is another joyful, convention-defying drama that knows how to work around the world of men without labouring the joke.

With Millie Bobby Brown cartwheeling through an ongoing series of action-inspired scenes, she steps out of Stranger Things‘s shadow into a period movie which works seamlessly down to her charm. Far more versatile than Emma Watson ever was as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series, her Enola drags you along as a tacit accomplice, much the same way that Phoebe Waller-Bridge did in Fleabag. With the film offering a delightful guessing game of which movie you’ve seen the film’s starry cast in before, check Helena Bonham Carter, Burn Gorman, Adeel Akhtar, David Bamber and Fiona Shaw for starters, but for my money, Frances De La Tour outshines the lot of them. Cast as a Dowager, she out Maggie Smith’s Maggie Smith in a role which she makes all of her own, whilst delivering the barbs the script affords her.

Targetting both entitlement and social mores fairly and squarely, neither Enola nor the film’s script takes any flak from the men that would give it. With a women’s suffrage subplot that promises more than it delivers, this is a nonetheless entertaining bowl of tea leaves which doesn’t trample too hard over the works of Arthur Conan Doyle. Caving in on the big conclusion which never really offers a tangible reason for its starting, Enola Holmes is still enjoyable fun provided you accept the fact, that this is not a Sherlock Holmes story but a comedy built on its foundations.

Should you settle down and watch it? Yes. So if you’re a Holmes purist foaming at the mouth, please put that irate teapot down for it is a formidable weapon. This is a comedy – and not of errors.

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