Enola Holmes (2020)

“Enola Holmes” is a Netflix original that, as far as I can tell, created the character of Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) entirely out of thin air.
I’d heard of Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and his brother Mycroft (Sam Caflin) before, but Enola and their mother Eudora (Helena Bonham Carter) were new cinematic creations.

Per the opening monologue, Enola’s brothers moved out and away when she was young, and there was a significant age gap between Sherlock and Enola; while never clarified, I will assume approximately a decade based on their interactions and Sherlock’s established reputation against Enola’s age of 16.
Their father died shortly after Enola was born, so it was only Eudora and Enola left at the Holmes manor, along with the help.
A series of cutesy animations and live-action flashbacks showed us Enola’s upbringing while she narrated to the audience, breaking the fourth wall the entire time.
Fortunately for us, the cutaways didn’t go away; throughout the movie, snippets were shown to help explain how Enola was reaching a conclusion – following her famous brother’s deductive footsteps – sometimes with Scrabble pieces to unpuzzle an anagram, or yet another flashback interlaced with the scene so you could see how past experiences were shaping present choices. It was a welcome choice, as I felt it very much reflected how we actually make decisions, often thinking about our own past as we’re trying to decide a next step.
Many of the flashbacks to Enola’s childhood were related to her mother teaching her things – quite a wide range, according to the borderline random flashbacks we were shown.
While every flashback was tied to part of whatever Enola was piecing together at the time, considering the breadth of problem solving tools that Enola used, it very much came across that Eudora was training her daughter to be a guerilla warfare intelligence agent instead of preparing her for ‘life’ in general.

While they didn’t overdo the ‘thinking’ sequences, they did overdo the fourth wall breaking: there were multiple scenes where Enola was alone in a room or otherwise unobservable by other characters, and she’d make a face at, or talk to, the camera. Those times were fine.
However, more than once, Enola would stop talking to someone else, turn away, face the camera and speak, only for the other character to then react to what she’d said without acknowledging her actions. There was no time freezing like in “Saved by the Bell” (1989-1993), which meant that in-universe, her behavior must have been deeply unsettling: imagine if you were in the middle of a conversation with someone and they cut you off mid-sentence to look at the wall and make a snarky comment or stick out their tongue, then turn back to you as if nothing happened.
This wasn’t an issue in “Deadpool” (2016) because breaking the fourth wall was his schtick – he was an immortal being who came to the conclusion that he could only exist – and not die – because he was a character in a story that a higher being (read: comic book artist) was writing.
No such convenience here – Enola must have just constantly looked like a crazy person.

Upon Mrs. Holmes’ disappearance, Mycroft and Sherlock returned home to decide what to do with the estate and their now-unsupervised sister, of whom Mycroft was the legal guardian. Considering that she was already 16 and it was made very clear that neither brother wanted anything to do with their sister as she was growing up, it came as no surprise that Mycroft wanted nothing more than to send Enola to a finishing school, which she obviously rebelled against immediately. Enola escaped from the manor with the intent of deducing her mother’s location, which she immediately assumed would be in London.
Conveniently, Eudora had left a series of clues that she hoped only Enola would connect. It’s unclear exactly what would have happened if Sherlock had stumbled upon any of them first.

As she escaped from the Holmes home, Enola found herself witness to an attempted murder – that of the young Marquess Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) – a young man who was to take his father’s seat in the House of Lords, following his father’s inconveniently-timed murder.
Despite a flashback of Eudora telling Enola that she should never deviate from her own goals to help someone else – especially a man – Enola’s conscience won out and she thwarted the would-be assassin (Burn Gorman). Once saved, Enola told Tewkesbury to go find his own path and that she was done with him, but being a movie about a teen girl, it was clear that wasn’t the last we’d see of him.
As news flowed through London that the young Lord Tewkesbury would take his late father’s role in a vague-yet-important vote, Enola decided that he should probably be kept alive so that his vote could count. Thus Enola put her mother-hunt on pause and constantly stayed one step ahead of both Sherlock and Scotland Yard to find the boy.
There was a bizarre, and fortunately small, series of scenes of physical contact between Tewkesbury and Enola, wherein they would touch hands and one or both of them would react as if on the edge of sexual release. It was really weird, like a PG-13 version of the deli scene from “When Harry Met Sally” (1989).

Being an American movie, you can guess exactly what the final scenes were, wrapping up the major plot points.

Here’s the thing that I can’t quite pin down: I’m not sure who this movie was for.
The storyline was simple enough that I can definitely say it was intended for kids and teens, and Enola was never sexualized in any adult way, thankfully, considering Millie Bobbie Brown is only 16.
However, there were multiple fight scenes where Enola got into serious fisticuffs with someone else, repeatedly with the assassin, and those fights were aggressive.
They were never bloody or gory, but it wasn’t fun watching a full-grown man punch a teenage girl multiple times, or try to drown her, or kick her in the head.
Those scenes felt very adult, in a way that was unsettling and felt like someone very specifically asked for them to be included as they were.
There was also a scene where Mycroft just straight-up screamed at Enola and she cried, which I would suspect to be the real-life response from a teen girl getting yelled at by her estranged older brother, but again: it was a very uncomfortable scene to sit through that didn’t really lend itself to any positive outcome.
There was a character death that was simply on-screen blunt-force-trauma. Again, it wasn’t gory or bloody, but it was a very specific directorial choice to include that type of death and to show it as such.

By the end of the movie, Sherlock, who had stood on the sidelines while Mycroft showed his colors as the most gaping of assholes, asked to have legal guardianship of Enola, as he clearly picked up on her detective prowess. Mycroft agreed immediately, as it meant one less problem he had to deal with.
I think this was supposed to show that Mycroft was “good” deep down inside, but it didn’t make up for his impressively awful behavior throughout the rest of the movie.
Sherlock, meanwhile, was painted as a quiet, caring brother, despite the opium-addicted jerk he was in the books.
Gregory House from “House” (2004-2012) was closely based on the literary version of Sherlock Holmes, if you need a character reference to gauge his dickery.

The music was cutesy throughout – nothing to write home about, but it was fitting. I don’t know if 1800s England had a soundtrack, but this worked. It would have been thematically at home in “A Series of Unfortunate Events” (2017-2019) or the “Dishonored” (2012/2016) videogames too.

The special effects were mostly good. By and large the movie was practical effects, apparently shot on actual streets or in real buildings, but whenever there was a pan shot of London, everything felt off. Despite not being a person, the scenery in those shots definitely fell into the uncanny valley, like they were a simulacrum of 1800s London. Just… eugh.

This movie was very clearly written so it could be a standalone if necessary, but also a springboard to a new show or series of movies, in the style of kid’s books that are episodic but not particularly tied together, like Animorphs or Artemis Fowl.

It was an okay movie. Megan and I watched it on a Sunday evening while folding laundry, so that worked for me.
I would have been unhappy if I’d paid to see this anywhere than as part of my current Netflix subscription.
If you’re looking for a movie, this one is fine. If not, carry on down your queue.