Credit: latimes.com
By Joelle Silvestri and Thza Kanapathipillai
Are you up for some mystery? Romance? Handle-bar moustaches? Henry Cavill? Then this might be the movie for you. You might know Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven from Stranger Things, but she trades her Eggos for her detective hat as the crime solving Enola Holmes in this flick. Enola Holmes takes us on an adventure to solve the mystery of her mother’s whereabouts using the clues her mother has left for her. She meets some interesting characters throughout her adventure that change her in ways she doesn’t expect. Unfortunately, in our opinion, Enola taking up two different cases made the story a bit of a mess, and it was difficult to properly follow the case with Enola. If you were a fan of BBC Sherlock, this may be a disappointing watch.
There were, however, many good qualities this movie had, but one thing that stood out most to us was the incorporation of feminism in the film. Throughout the movie, Enola Holmes comes across many male characters, but she never relies on them. She is independent and goes against the “damsel in distress” stereotype that we see so often in film. The movie also touches on the women’s suffrage movement. Holmes’s mother, Eudoria, is a suffragette and fights for women’s rights throughout the film. One of the movie’s most powerful female characters, also a suffragette, is the fierce jiu jitsu warrior, Edith. The character Edith is a person of color with a prominent role in the movie. Diversity was something that popular renditions of Sherlock Holmes, like the BBC Sherlock show, was lacking. As an added bonus to her inspiring character, she is also a part of an underground group with Eudoria fighting for women’s rights. She doesn’t let men’s ideas dictate what she does and fights for what is right.
Although the characters in this movie are the same characters who have been portrayed several times by a multitude of different actors, this movie wasn’t safe from legal shenanigans. Netflix even faced a lawsuit from Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate for giving Sherlock Holmes “too many feelings” and for respecting women! Despite the confusing storyline, Enola Holmes is an entertaining movie for anyone new to the Sherlock franchise and definitely worth the watch if you are up for it!
