Enola Holmes Trailer: The Holmes Women Promise To Break Fourth Walls And Glass Ceilings

Trailer for the upcoming film Enola Holmes is out, and it’s been hard to contain our excitement since then. Enola Holmes, the notorious sister of the world’s most popular detective Sherlock Holmes, is played by Millie Bobby Brown. In the trailer, Enola is given Fleabag capacity to break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience. She has Dickinson powers of being a badass teen-girl with a modern sensibility in Victorian times. And she reminds a lot of those Famous Five characters with her hoydenish detective kid attitude. Alongside a wily mother, played by Helena Bonham Carter, and older brothers like Sherlock, played by Henry Cavill, and Mycroft, played by Sam Claflin, the trailer sees the Holmes family members enter into a battle of wits against each other. And needless to say, the results look promising!

The film is based upon the novel The Case of the Missing Marquess: An Enola Holmes Mystery written by Nancy Springer and will build upon the world first created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The screenplay has been written by Jack Throne, whose credits range from Harry Potter and The Cursed Child to The Aeronauts, while the Emmy-winning Fleabag director Harry Bradbeer is in the director’s chair. The film will also star Adeel Akhtar, Fiona Shaw, Frances De La Tour, Louis Partridge and Susan Wokoma in pivotal roles. Enola Holmes is all set to premiere on Netflix on September 23.

A Thrilling Trailer

If the sound of Millie Bobby Brown as Enola Holmes breaking the fourth wall got you excited, wait till you see her breaking those glass ceilings. The trailer begins by introducing Enola’s relationship with her mother and her two brothers. “She was my whole world”, says Enola of her mother, as the audience sees shots of them sword-fighting, experimenting chemical reactions and playing badminton. Yes, we know what you’re thinking—what a peculiar mother-daughter duo! But one day, Enola’s mother goes missing and she has to call on her brothers to find her. But as used to happen in the Victorian society, men taking the centre stage meant women being pushed to the margins, or in this case, into a boarding school. Enola’s eldest brother Mycroft is scandalised by her boisterous nature and decides to “make her acceptable for society”. And thence commences her training.

But the younger Holmes sibling turns out to be as smart, if not smarter, than her brothers and she manages to fool them and run away. And from there begins Enola’s one-woman-journey to find her mother. The trailer also shows Enola scheming devious plans to remain hidden from her brothers. She meets a cute boy on the way (a viscount!) and also learns hand-to-hand combat.

The Feminist Angle Has Gotten Fans Excited

The trailer shows us a mother who plans to change the world, one sneaky scheme at a time. And a daughter whom she brings up in her own shadow. “There are two paths you can take. Yours or the path others choose for you”, Mama Holmes tells Enola. We see the two Holmes women fight back the patriarchal double-standards of the Victorian society which tries to push them back into the kitchen and the bedroom. And in the process, we see these two ladies giving all the men around them a run for their money.

We are also given a glimpse at the two different types of men in Mycroft and Sherlock—the former is a typical misogynist who is outraged when his little sister refuses to cover her hands with gloves, while the latter is the sneaky ally who seems to be aware of the double-standards of the society, but still helps his sister get away with things anyway. That’s right, we have a warm, kind and humane Sherlock in this film, who in all honesty feels more charming than the conceited and misogynistic one. All in all, the trailer for Enola Holmes looks quite impressive and promising. The film does seem like it’ll belong to the Holmes women, and that itself is enough to put us on the edge of our seats and hold our breaths till the release date.

Dyuti Gupta is an intern with SheThePeople.TV. The views expressed are the author’s own.