‘Enola Holmes’: a new detective joins the game

Above: Millie Bobby Brown stars in the Netflix Original film "Enola Holmes." (Netflix)

Movie review: "Enola Holmes," directed by Harry Bradbeer, starring Millie Bobby Brown, Helena Bonham Carter, Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin. Streaming through Netflix.

Sherlock Holmes emerged as a character in 1887, appearing along with his famous sidekick Dr. John Watson in the novel “A Study in Scarlet.” Over the next four decades, author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle having died in 1930, Holmes would appear in three more Conan Doyle-written novels and 56 short stories.

Those 60 works are known by literary critics as the traditional “Holmes Canon.” Yet that collection, of course, is hardly the half of it. Holmes has appeared in numerous other non-Canon stories, stage plays and essays – some, but not all, written by Conan Doyle – along with many, many movie adaptations and television productions.

Think of Basil Rathbone who appeared as Holmes 14 times with Nigel Bruce as Watson in movies released during the 1930s and ’40s. Think more recently of Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson in the 2009 and 2011 Guy Ritchie-directed movies (with a third one forthcoming). And think of the four seasons of the BBC series “Sherlock” starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson.

And even given all that, imaginative as some of it is – especially the Ritchie films and BBC production – none of it quite matches what young-adult writer Nancy Springer dreamed up in 2006. That was when the first of her Enola Holmes mysteries, “The Case of the Missing Marquess,” was published.

Fantasizing that Conan Doyle’s rigorous and well-known private investigator Sherlock and his older brother Mycroft have a younger sister, 20 years Sherlock’s junior, Springer puts her teenage character in a series of adventures that also feature some of Conan Doyle’s other characters. Between 2006 and 2010, Springer wrote six Enola Holmes books – the whole of which have been adapted, more or less, into the Netflix Original movie titled, appropriately enough, “Enola Holmes.”

Starring the English actress Millie Bobby Brown (best known for her role as the character Eleven in the Netflix series “Stranger Things”), this movie version of Sherlock’s younger sister is a curious mix of tones. For starters, there’s the character of Enola herself, now seen as a 16-year-old, whose upbringing in the remote Holmes estate keeps her at a distance not just from people her own age but from her two brothers as well.

If this isn’t made clear enough for us, we’re directed at one point to look at her name spelled backward. Yeah, it’s a-l-o-n-e – alone.

Director Harry Bradbeer, working from a script by Jack Thorne, takes pains to deliver such clues in a distinctly obvious way: He has Brown continually breaking the fourth wall and addressing the screen directly, giving “Enola Holmes” a post-modernly self-referential feel. Yes, we’re in on the joke, a stylism that might become tiring were it not for actress Brown’s innate grit and charm. Her Enola may be young, but she is quite capable of living up to her family name.

Yet there’s a serious side to the movie, too. Enola awakens one morning to find that her mother has disappeared. Her brothers, when they show up, offer little support other than forcing Enola into the kind of finishing school designed to train her to be a cheerful, obedient young woman suitable for marriage.

That, at least, is how she is treated by Mycroft (played by Sam Claflin), the stuffy conservative, disapproving of the free hand his suffragette mother (played by Helena Bonham Carter) has given to Enola. Sherlock (played by the hunky Henry Cavill) is more discreet in his attitude, though he – at least at first – offers little to Enola in the way of support.

So she does what any spirited Victorian girl with a 21st-century temperament would do: She runs away. Heading for London, she searches for her mother, gets involved in the case of a wayward Lord (played by Louis Partridge), blends all the lessons that her mother taught her with her own independent spirit, all the while dodging the agents pursuing her – including both a would-be killer (played by the sinister Burn Gorham) and a character familiar to all Conan Doyle fans, Inspector Lestrade (played by the bumbling Adeel Akhtar).

“Enola Holmes” may be far from the best addition to the Holmes collection. But it is one of the most unique, and it serves well as an object lesson for girls on the path to adulthood. Save for one or two sequences that might be a bit too graphically scary for younger children, it makes for a perfect Friday night family view.

Because for young Enola, like her famous detective brother, the game is definitely afoot.