Get ready to watch Enola Holmes on Netflix tomorrow.
Different iterations on the story of Sherlock Holmes have been coming out for decades now, but Enola Holmes is truly a different take than we’ve ever seen. Adapted from the young-adult books, Millie Bobby Brown --who doubled as its producer--plays the titular character, cementing her spot a huge movie star in the making.
In the film, the teenage sister of Sherlock (played by Henry Cavill) wakes up on her 16th birthday to discover that their mother (played by Helena Bonham Carter), who has raised her quite independently for the 1880s, has completely disappeared. This discovery triggers a mad search to find her, much to the chagrin of her other buttoned-up brother, Mycroft (played by Sam Claflin), who is eager to get rid of her by tossing her into a finishing school for girls.
“You want me controlled,” Enola snaps back defiantly.
Gifted with an agile mind just like her brother’s, Enola (“alone” spelled backwards, she informs us) announces, ”The game is afoot,” but she’s soon distracted by new game, in the form of a teenage aristocrat (played by Louis Partridge) that she encounters, who appears to be the target of a murder plot. Both of these mysteries continue along parallel tracks, throughout the film, which is appropriate, since Enola first meets the young lord on a train.
For fans of the iconic Sherlock Holmes character, the countless different incarnations of his story on screen have also included Young Sherlock Holmes and Gene Wilder’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother. Still, even with all of the different Holmes stories we’ve already seen, Enola manages to carve out its own path as the heroine’s efforts to outsmart her siblings offering an amusing garnish to the more serious detective work within the plot.
While we all know that Millie Bobby Brown already has an extensive film career at just 16-years-old, as a producer, she’s just getting started. There are additional books from this same series by Nancy Springer waiting to be made into an Enola Holmes sequel, which could also be on Brown’s list.
Interestingly enough, the Conan Doyle Estate has filed a lawsuit claiming copyright infringement and trademark violations against Netflix, production company Legendary Pictures, book publishers Penguin Random House and others, including book author Nancy Springer over this new film.
While the majority of Sherlock Holmes stories are in the public domain as of 2014, the Conan Doyle Estate still owns the copyright for the final ten stories written between 1923 and 1927. The lawsuit alleged that these final ten stories are when Sherlock started to show more emotion and became “warmer”--which is something, they argue, is shown in the film.
Enola Holmes is set to premiere on Netflix on September 23.
