Film / Enola Holmes 2

Go big. Go Holmes.

Some of what follows is true. The important parts at least.

Enola Holmes 2 is a 2022 historical detective film and the sequel to the 2020 film Enola Holmes based on Nancy Springer's book series of the same name. Harry Bradbeer and Jack Thorne return to direct and write, respectively. Making up the cast are returning members Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, Louis Partridge, Adeel Akhtar, Susie Wokoma, and Helena Bonham Carter, as well as new additions Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Hannah Dodd, and David Thewlis.

Following the events of the first film, Enola Holmes has started up her own detective agency, but business struggles due to her being a young woman and being in the shadow of her legendary brother, Sherlock. However, she soon gets her break when a young girl employed in a match factory hires her to locate her missing sister - a case that crosses into a mystery being tackled by Sherlock with far reaching implications.

The film released on Netflix on November 4, 2022.

Previews: Trailer Part 1, Trailer Part 2

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Enola Holmes 2 includes examples of:

• Adaptational Deviation: While the first film adapted the first book of the series, this one takes a more original plotline inspired by the real life Matchgirls' Strike of 1888. The filmmakers even go so far as to combine Lady Cecily, a character from the books, with Sarah Chapman, a real life leader of the strikes.
• Affably Evil: Mira Troy, she's the Big Bad all along but she makes it a point to reach out to Enola at the dance and give her friendly advice on playing "the game" of society. Then again, they later imply another motivation - letting her eavesdrop on Enola's conversation with William, which is only possible thanks to Mira's advice.
• Agitated Item Stomping: Sherlock angrily kicks a sign on the street (scaring an offscreen cat) after failing to get Enola exonerated for killing Mae.
• All Asians Know Martial Arts: During the climax, the Dirty Cop who fights Sherlock is backed up by an Asian man who uses a lot of kicks.
• All for Nothing: Subverted. The climactic battle ends with McIntyre burning the documents that will prove Lyons' malpractice, crushing Sarah's efforts to expose the corruption. However, Enola inspires her to take another route: lead the other factory girls in a strike. Also, Tewkesbury later helps Lestrade arrest McIntyre by undisclosed means.
• Alliterative Name: At the dance, Enola gives her alias as Tabitha Timothy.
• Anachronistic Soundtrack: Both trailers use a cover of the 2003 rock song "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" by Jet to score a story set in Victorian London. The version in the second trailer is more orchestral as the stakes are revealed.
• Bait-and-Switch: After the reveal that Moriarty is involved, there are a few hints that Grail might be him. As it turns out, he's just being used by the real Big Bad.
• The Big Board: Sherlock's got a map of London on his wall marked with the movements of the money he's trying to follow. It's big enough to hide a large secret compartment behind it — useful for when you need to hide your younger sister from the cops.
• Bottomless Magazines: Grail fires seven shots from what's presumably a six chambered revolver during the climax.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • Once again, Enola routinely breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly. Nobody in-universe seems aware of her doing this. However, much to Enola's annoyance, Sherlock himself is depicted doing this in a promo for Netflix's then-upcoming 2022 releases, which includes footage from Enola Holmes 2.
  • Enola asks the audience if Tewkesbury is looking back at her after a UST-laden conversation in the park just as Tewkesbury is looking back in a Funny Background Event, but he's back on track when she looks back from her fourth-wall break, so she assumes that he wasn't looking back at her in her next aside.
• Brick Joke: Early in the movie, Enola suggests to Sherlock that he get a flatmate in order to stop him from getting drunk and to help him tidy up. Who should turn up in The Stinger than Doctor Watson himself!
• Call-Back: As she did in the previous film, Enola lets it slip to Tewkesbury that she's undercover before instructing him to forget that.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Both Enola and Tewkesbury are guilty of this. Enola is seemingly in total denial of her obvious feelings for Tewkesbury, while he cannot find the right way to tell her, devolving into a babbling mess at one point. They both get better, eventually confessing their love for one another.
• Car Chase: A carriage version ensues when Eudoria and Edith break Enola out of prison, pursued by Grail and his men.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The science textbook and potted plants in the Chapman sisters' flat. Sarah and her co-conspirators used these to test the lethality of the white phosphorous.
  • The fake switchblade Mae uses to intimidate Enola at the Paragon. Grail attempts to use it against Enola during the climax, thinking it's real.
  • Sarah's dress as "Lady Cecily" can be seen in a corner while Enola snoops backstage.
• Clear Their Name: Sherlock tries to exonerate Enola of Mae's murder throughout the film. He makes a couple of convincing Sherlock Scans pointing to another culprit, but is thwarted by new fingerprinting technology that supposedly places Enola at the scene with the murder weapon. The real murderer, Grail, is killed at the end while the mastermind, Moriarty, goes to prison, and Enola walks free.
• Complexity Addiction: Mira Troy creates a very elaborate scheme of bank fraud, blackmail, codes, conspiracy, and a double murder to lure the Holmes into solving it, discovering her boss' corruption, and blaming him for the murders. There were a number of easier ways to do so, but she wanted to show off her intellect to Holmes after spending so long having to hide it.
• Contrived Coincidence: Seemingly so. Superintendent Grail appears right as Enola discovers Mae's body, which she later figures is because he was already following her on orders from the conspiracy's mastermind.
• The Corpse Stops Here: Enola gets wrongfully accused of murder just because she was seen near Mae's body. It doesn't help that she then admits to arriving on scene right when screams were heard despite not hearing them herself. It's justified by Grail being corrupt and looking for a reason to arrest her.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Grail suffers a Groin Attack from a hook, which then yanks him up, and smashes his skull against a wooden beam, before his lifeless body topples to the stage below.
• Dance of Romance: Enola and Tewkesbury's impromptu dance lesson at the Match Makers Ball brings their suppressed feelings to the surface.
• Dances and Balls: Enola infiltrates a ball to try and talk to William Lyon, but her attempts are stymied by her lack of in-depth familiarity with Victorian etiquette. She's unaware that talking to an upper-class man without a chaperone is scandalous unless they're dancing, but she can't dance either.
• Dirty Cop: Superintendent Grail and his men are all corrupt and in the pocket of Moriarty. They act as the main threat for most of the film, pursuing Enola and even framing her for Mae's murder. Enola actually points out that Grail is dressed too elegantly for any man on a policeman's salary, cluing her in that someone is paying him.
• Dramatic Chase Opening: The film begins with Enola making a mad dash to escape the cops through the streets of London. She then takes the viewer back to when the whole adventure began.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Sherlock is first seen in the film just having been thrown out of a pub, drinking due to frustration with his latest case.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Sherlock angrily rattles off various flaws in Enola's appearance, including that her neck is red...in a way that means someone must have held a knife to it. He instantly softens, concerned for her safety.
• The Faceless: Initially, any image of Sarah shows her from the back. This is to hide the reveal that she has been masquerading as Lady Cecily to get to Lord Tewkesbury in order to get his aid.
• Failure Montage: Early in the film, there is a sequence of Enola's potential clients rejecting her due to being a child, a woman, or just preferring her more accomplished brother.
• Flower Motif: Returning as a staple of the series. The love letter Enola finds is "signed" with a poppy, a symbol of death. However, it was actually a sweet william, representing William Lyon.
• Foreshadowing: Doubles as a Mythology Gag. Sherlock notes that his so-far-unknown nemesis is a criminal mastermind and mathematical genius. In the original novels, Moriarty was a professor of mathematics.
• Frame-Up: Halfway through the film, Enola is framed by Grail for Mae's murder.
• Fresh Clue: Subverted. At the scene of William's murder Enola and Sherlock find clues that point to Charles McIntyre as the culprit, including his signature cigar. However, Sherlock realizes that the cigar is cold and there's no ash in the tray, meaning these "clues" were planted by someone who wanted them to think McIntyre was the culprit.
• Groin Attack: Enola twice performs this on Superintendent Grail, the second time with a hook.
• Gray Rain of Depression: It starts pouring after Sherlock fails to exonerate Enola for Mae's murder.
• Happy Ending Override: Enola opens her new detective business, but no-one takes her seriously and attribute her success from the last movie to Sherlock.
• How We Got Here: The film opens with Enola running from a pair of bobbies before turning to the audience to explain how this happened.
• I Know Karate: Enola uses her knowledge of jujitsu as a selling point while trying to set up her detective business in the opening. It doesn't work.
• Impaled Palm: Sergeant Beeston, one of Grail's subordinates, has a stab wound on his right hand from getting stabbed with a pen.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: During the climax, Sherlock flings his unsheathed Sword Cane to Tewkesbury and the latter catches it by the hilt without cutting himself.
• Improvised Weapon: Grail makes good use of these during his fight scenes; he takes out Eudoria's carriage by throwing a signpost through a wheel and uses a hook and pulley during his fight with Enola in the climax.
• Inconvenient Attraction: Enola is absolutely crazy about Tewkesbury, and boy is she annoyed about it. She gets over herself by the end, of course.
• Insult of Endearment: Enola continues to call Tewkesbury a "nincompoop" as per the previous film, now with a lot more affection.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Despite burning the papers that prove his corruption, Tewkesbury still manages to get Lord McIntyre arrested at the end through other means.
• Lies to Children: Sarah told Bess her second job was washing dishes in a fictional pub, to hide that she and Mae were performing in a seedy cabaret.
• Line-of-Sight Name: When Sarah told Bess she worked in a pub, she got the name from a set of stag antlers hanging over the doorway to the cabaret's dressing room.
• Logo Joke: The illustrated Legendary Pictures logo returns from the previous film, but instead of a flower border, the edges of the screen slowly burn.
• MacGuffin: The mysterious stolen property that corrupt cops are hunting down Sarah Chapman to get. It's actually a collection of documents that prove Lyon and McIntyre's dirty deals, and Mira Troy's theft.
• Man Bites Man: Bess starts off the climactic fight by biting Grail in the hand.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Enola's investigation into a missing girl ends up entangling her in a conspiracy that would potentially kill hundreds of young women in pursuit of profits and bring her and her brother face to face with his most infamous nemesis.
• Mistaken for Murderer: Enola arrives at a murder scene with the killer having already disappeared. She gets the victim's blood on her hands...and then the police arrive. She has to make a break for it. Subverted, since it's revealed that those same policeman were the actual murderers and were framing Enola rather than genuinely believing she did something wrong.
• Motive Rant: After the climax at the theater, Big Bad Mira Troy gives a rant about how she's been demeaned and powerless her whole life as a black woman who can't even have money of her own, which is why she turned to crime.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Sherlock's attempt to free someone who is framed for murder get scarpered because an antagonistic inspector declares the person guilty by their fabricated fingerprints is similar to the original Sherlock Holmes short story "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder".
  • "Where did you get that hat?", the song sung by the chorus girls at the Paragon, previously appears in the Sherlock parody film Without a Clue.
  • One of the people who comes into Enola's detective agency asks if she's a secretary. In the book series, Enola opened her detective agency under a false name and posed as the secretary to interact with clients.
  • In the books, Lady Cecily was the missing person in Enola's second case, which offers a major clue to book readers about her true identity in the film.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer makes it seem like the scenes of Sherlock's bad violin playing and him kicking the bin were the result of his frustration from being stumped, in fact neither has to do with his case: the music didn't sound right due to the song being a cipher rather than musical composition and he kicks the bin when he is unable to simply walk in and demand Enola's release.
• Not Helping Your Case: After encountering Tewkesbury in the park he regularly walks through on his way to work, Enola insists to the audience that she doesn't come to the park every day, just when she needs to. She then states that sometimes Tewkesbury takes a path parallel to the one she just met him on.
• Official Couple: Enola and Tewkesbury confess their feelings to each other before the climax, and the end of film shows they're courting properly.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: Heard playing when Enola is put on death row before being broken out.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Sherlock gets shot in the arm by Grail during the climax, but it doesn't pain him too much given that he takes on two of Grail's men at once.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Try starting a detective agency when your brother is Sherlock Holmes. Combined with the time's standards for appropriate careers for women, Enola's business quickly falls apart, especially after the press incorrectly attributed the solving of the Tewkesbury case to Sherlock.
• Race Lift:
  • Combined with a Gender Flip: Moriarty in this continuity happens to be Ms. Mira Troy, a black woman, played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster.
  • Doctor Watson is portrayed here by Himesh Patel, who is of Indian descent.
• Realpolitik: Downplayed. Tewkesbury is very much a force for progressive policies, but he privately admits to Enola that it's not as glamorous as the papers make it out to be and that he's had to make a lot of compromises to get his bills passed.
• Red Herring: The first clues lead Enola to suspect that William Lyon, son of the Lyon Matchsticks' owner, is Sarah's kidnapper. He's actually her sweetheart and working with her to expose the company's malpractice.
• Royal Mess: Society papers still call Tewksbury a Viscount (his former courtesy title), where they should be referring to him as his present title of Marquess.
• Rube Goldberg Device: There's a recurring flashback to Eudoria and a young Enola putting together a complicated machine with many steps that simply ends up cracking an egg. It fits with the story's theme of small, random things affecting change. In the climax, Enola remembers it while looking at the pulleys on the ceiling of the Paragon Theatre, and it lets her defeat Grail.
• Sequel Hook: Mira Troy (Moriarty) is shown in a newspaper to have escaped police custody. Also, the mid-credits scene introduces Sherlock's new flatmate, Dr. John Watson.
• Sequel Non-Entity: Mycroft. Due to Sam Claflin being unavailable for the film, his sole appearance is as a still image in an Imagine Spot Enola has early in the film and a quick flashback to him as a child.
• Sherlock Scan: True to the Trope Namer, Sherlock gets in a couple of instant deductions from observing things around him...
  • From the color her fingernails turn overnight, he deduces that Enola has been working in a match factory. As Sherlock himself points out, he could tell this even while drunk.
  • He can tell from various signs of struggle at Mae's murder that three men, one of whom had a cane, broke in and assailed her.
  • He's also able to immediately decipher a secret message that had previously taken Enola considerably longer to decode.
  • Enola herself is no slouch at this either. When investigating William's murder, she and Sherlock trade off scans as they search the room for clues to find out that Grail and his cops killed him, but someone planted evidence to implicate Lord McIntyre.
• Shout-Out: A would-be murderer attempts to stab the heroine with a knife, only for it to turn out to be a stage prop? Sounds familiar.
• Significant Anagram: Moriarty. It happens to be an anagram of her real name: Mira Troy.
• So Proud of You: Eudoria to Enola, albeit with motherly advice to get a haircut. Also, Sherlock, who is sufficiently impressed by Enola's work to offer her a partnership as Holmes & Holmes - which Enola turns down to pursue her own path, while clearly delighted by the offer.
• Spoiler Cover: The official poster features the character of Mira Troy, aka Moriarty somewhat prominently, even though in the movie it first appears like she's just a minor supporting character. Downplayed, as it still doesn't give any hint to her true identity.
• The Stinger: A mid-credits scene shows Doctor Watson arriving at 221b Baker Street, having been directed there by Enola to apply to be Sherlock's flatmate.
• String Theory: Holmes has a map in his flat detailing a chain of suspicious money transfers between banks. He eventually realizes that the patterns are meant to resemble dance steps, allowing him to eventually uncover a hidden message from Moriarty.
• Sword Cane: Tewkesbury's a fencer, so when a fight breaks out Sherlock tosses him a sword he had hidden in his cane.
• Tempting Fate: As Grail attempts to menace Enola at the Paragon Theatre, he tells her "I used to dream I'd end up on the stage." She grants his wish when she gets him ensnared on a hook that pulls him up and causes him to break his neck against a wooden beam, causing his body to fall right onto the stage below.
• Terrible Trio: Dirty Cop Grail works with two subordinates, each of whom has their own specialties: one fights with a sword, the other a billy club.
• Uptown Girl: Enola theorizes that working-class factory girl Sarah Chapman was seeing an upperclass man, who either was responsible for her disappearance or her sweetheart. It turns out to be the latter; she was in a relationship with William Lyon, the son of the man who owned the factory.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The film's story takes some inspiration from the real life Matchgirls' Strike of 1888, with the fictional Lyon Matchstick Company taking the place of the actual company, Bryant & May. In fact, Enola is initially hired to find Sarah Chapman, who was the leader of the strikes in real life. Sarah's disappearance was actually her going into hiding as she, another matchgirl named Mae, and William Lyon, the son of the factory owner, worked to uncover the factory's efforts to disguise the illnesses among their factory workers caused by the the phosphorus used to make the matches as Typhus. While the evidence is destroyed and William and Mae are killed, Enola, Sarah, and Bessie return to the factory and provoke a mass walk-out, beginning the strike.

• Working the Same Case: Sherlock begins the film investigating a case of missing government money as Enola takes on a case regarding a missing matchgirl. As the story progresses, the two cases merge into a web of conspiracy and murder.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Mae and Sarah both perform in drag shows for a music hall, and are both firmly heroic characters. There's also a one-off boy who swaps clothes with Enola to help her evade police, and seems to enjoy wearing her dress.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: When Grail interrogates Enola after arresting her finds and she has no information on Sarah, he leaves her for the noose.

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It only takes one flame to start a fire.

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