Enola Holmes Didn’t Reinvent Sherlock Holmes — It Changed Who Gets to Tell the Story

By 2020, Sherlock Holmes hardly needed another introduction. The deerstalker, Baker Street, deduction and emotional distance had survived more than a century of reinvention. Enola Holmes found its way around that familiarity by doing something deceptively simple: it stopped treating Sherlock as the most important person in the room.

Harry Bradbeer’s film does not dismantle the Holmes mythology. It moves the camera. Sherlock becomes the brilliant older brother seen from somebody else’s perspective, while his younger sister Enola claims the mystery, the narration and, crucially, the audience for herself.

That shift is why the film feels more distinctive than its premise initially suggests. Nancy Springer’s books supplied a new Holmes sibling, but the adaptation’s most effective idea was not merely adding Enola to Sherlock’s world. It was allowing her to decide how that world would be presented.

The Holmes universe looks different when Sherlock isn’t narratively in charge

Enola begins with disadvantages Sherlock rarely has to negotiate. Her intelligence is obvious, but the society around her does not automatically recognise intelligence as authority. Her mother Eudoria has educated her outside convention, only for Eudoria’s disappearance to expose how precarious that freedom is.

Mycroft’s solution is to turn Enola into what Victorian society expects a young woman to be. Sherlock is less controlling, but even he initially occupies the position of observer rather than rescuer. Enola therefore has to become her own detective while simultaneously resisting other people’s plans for her life.

This is what gives the film its own relationship with the Holmes mythology. Deduction remains important, but Enola’s greatest mystery is also social: who is she allowed to become?

Enola Holmes doesn’t make Sherlock less intelligent. It makes his intelligence only one way of understanding the world.

Millie Bobby Brown was shaping Enola before she played her

The perspective shift becomes even more interesting when the film’s development is considered. Brown was not simply hired after somebody else decided Enola should become a movie.

Her older sister Paige discovered Springer’s books and introduced them to Millie. The sisters became interested in bringing the character to screen and, through their PCMA Productions company, took the project to Legendary. Netflix’s 2020 acquisition announcement lists Millie Bobby Brown and Paige Brown among the producers alongside Legendary’s Mary Parent, Alex Garcia and Ali Mendes.

Brown later told Vogue that she and her family had taken the idea to Legendary because they wanted to create something centred on a young British female lead. Her producer role extended into casting and writing discussions, as well as extensive conversations with Bradbeer about the film’s energy, emotion and eccentricity.

That matters because Enola’s authorship of her own story is not merely a theme within the screenplay. The actor playing her had unusual creative involvement in deciding what that story would become.

Breaking the fourth wall gives Enola something Sherlock usually owns

The most visible expression of that authorship is Enola’s habit of looking directly into the camera.

She talks to us, reacts to us and occasionally seems to recruit us into the investigation. It creates intimacy immediately, but it also performs an important structural function: Enola controls the information.

Sherlock adaptations traditionally make audiences chase the detective’s mind. We observe clues and wait for Holmes to explain what everybody else missed. Enola Holmes changes the relationship. Enola lets us into her thought process as it happens, making the audience her confidant rather than merely an admirer waiting for the solution.

The device naturally invites comparisons with Fleabag, especially because Bradbeer directed episodes of that series. But Bradbeer explained in an interview about the film that the idea actually came from screenwriter Jack Thorne. Faced with a character who had spent so much time alone, Thorne needed a way for Enola to communicate her thoughts and feelings directly.

Bradbeer’s experience made him particularly well suited to executing it, but Brown’s performance is what prevents the technique from becoming a gimmick. Enola does not simply deliver exposition to camera. Her glances can be conspiratorial, embarrassed, triumphant or uncertain. The audience becomes the one companion she can take everywhere.

Henry Cavill’s Sherlock had to work differently too

Moving Sherlock away from the centre creates another problem: what do you do with one of popular culture’s most dominant fictional personalities once he becomes a supporting character?

The film’s answer is restraint. Henry Cavill’s Sherlock remains observant and intellectually formidable, but his relationship with Enola exposes a warmer, less impenetrable version of the detective. He recognises abilities in her that Mycroft either cannot see or refuses to value.

Bradbeer described the appeal of seeing Sherlock from another side — through a dysfunctional family and a mother and sister who make the supposedly unknowable detective more understandable. That is an important distinction. The film does not defeat Sherlock in order to elevate Enola. It humanises him enough that he can occupy her story without consuming it.

That interpretation became unexpectedly significant outside the film itself. The Conan Doyle Estate sued parties associated with Enola Holmes, arguing in part that the film used a warmer and more emotional Sherlock derived from later Holmes stories that were then still protected by US copyright. The case was subsequently dismissed with prejudice by agreement of the parties, as The Guardian reported.

The dispute was unusual, but it inadvertently highlighted what the film was doing: this Sherlock’s capacity for affection and respect towards Enola was noticeable enough to become part of a copyright argument.

The Victorian setting isn’t just decorative

The production has all the pleasures expected from a large-scale Victorian mystery: country houses, railway stations, London streets, elaborate costumes and a heroine who can move between social worlds through disguise. But the period is doing more than providing attractive scenery.

Almost every conventional space presents Enola with rules. Clothing controls movement. Finishing school attempts to control behaviour. Her brothers debate her future as though it were an administrative problem. Even travelling alone becomes an act of independence.

The film’s costumes therefore operate on two levels. They create period identity, but they also give Enola tools. She can exploit expectations surrounding class, age and gender because people repeatedly see what they expect to see. Disguise is a classic Holmes device, yet here it acquires another dimension: Enola learns how society categorises women and then uses those categories to move through it.

That makes the historical setting inseparable from the character. Put the same mystery in the present day and Enola would still be clever, but much of what she is fighting against would disappear.

A mystery that ultimately isn’t about proving she’s smarter than Sherlock

One of the film’s better decisions is resisting the easiest possible conclusion. Enola does not need to expose Sherlock as a fraud or solve a puzzle he is incapable of understanding.

Her victory is more personal. She demonstrates that her methods, priorities and emotional instincts can produce a detective who is recognisably connected to Holmes without becoming a miniature version of him.

That difference extends to Lord Tewkesbury. Enola’s involvement in his disappearance begins as an interruption to her search for Eudoria, but it gradually forces her to choose whether independence means refusing every attachment or deciding for herself which people are worth helping.

The distinction is important because the film’s idea of freedom is not isolation. Enola begins believing that being alone is almost a philosophy — her name backwards has made the point since childhood. By the end, independence means possessing the authority to choose her own relationships and direction.

That’s why the film made room for another Holmes

Enola Holmes arrived in a culture already crowded with Sherlock adaptations. Another attempt to modernise the detective, darken him, make him younger or give him a different visual style would have been competing on extremely familiar ground.

Instead, the film changes the hierarchy.

Sherlock is still Sherlock. London is still filled with mysteries. Deduction, disguise and eccentric family members still belong to the world Arthur Conan Doyle created and Nancy Springer later expanded. But the camera belongs to Enola.

She decides when to speak to us. She decides which mystery matters. She chooses which conventions to obey, which identities to wear and when her famous brother deserves to know what she has discovered.

That is the film’s real reinvention. It does not ask how Sherlock Holmes can be made new again.

It asks what happens when Sherlock Holmes is no longer the person who gets to tell the story.