Enola Holmes 3 Review: A Netflix Mystery That Never Picks A Tone

Table of Contents

Neither of us walked into this one expecting much, and that instinct turned out to be correct. Enola Holmes 3 dropped on Netflix on July 1, the third entry in a franchise we have covered on Fully-Booked since the beginning. We wanted to like it. We really did. What we got is a film that looks lovely, moves politely, and disappears from your memory about eleven minutes after the credits roll.

Meaghan set the mood early:

Netflix did what it does, and it’s dropping a few random things here and there to keep people minorly entertained during the summer.

You know exactly the kind of movie she means. The one you put on while you prep a barbecue and half-watch from the kitchen. Something safe for the kids who are stuck inside on a hot afternoon.

That is not automatically a bad thing. It just is not what this film was sold as, and that gap is where most of our problems started.

Note
The following is an editorialized transcript of our weekly literary podcast. If you would like to listen to the podcast, click the play button above orlisten on your favorite platform with the links below.

Where the Enola Holmes Franchise Actually Came From

Quick background for anyone joining us mid-series. Netflix launched Enola Holmes in 2020 with Millie Bobby Brown in the lead, adapting the young adult mystery series by Nancy Springer. There are ten books, written between 2006 and 2023, following Sherlock Holmes’ much younger sister as she solves her own cases. It is a fun spin on Arthur Conan Doyle’s original work, taking a famous name and handing it to a teenage girl who is very good at the family business. As Shirin put it, “yay, female empowerment as well.“

The first film adapted the first book, The Case of the Missing Marquess. Then things drifted. The 2022 sequel and this new one are original screenplays by Jack Thorne, not adaptations of anything Springer wrote. Springer does not appear to have been involved in the scripts at all. She sold the rights, and that seems to be where her participation ended.

Shirin wondered whether that disconnect explains why this entry feels so thin. “I wonder if that’s what’s lending itself to this one being a little bit less” (Meaghan supplied the word: lackluster). We think there is something to that. When you are no longer adapting a plot, you have to build one, and building one is harder than it looks.

The Tone Problem Sinks Enola Holmes 3

Here is the thing that broke this movie for us. Nobody involved seems to have agreed on what kind of film they were making.

Philip Barantini takes over the director’s chair from Harry Bradbeer, who handled the first two. Barantini reportedly pitched this as the darker installment, comparing the shift to what Prisoner of Azkaban did for the Harry Potter series. Shirin’s response, once we discovered that:

Alright, well, sir, you did not execute on the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Everything stays flat and sunny and weightless, which is strange because the story on paper is quite dark. There is a murder. There is a kidnapping. There is arson. Enola’s life is genuinely in danger more than once. And you sit there feeling absolutely nothing about any of it.

“That was always my beef with Poirot,” Shirin said, “that it’s like you’ve got a high-stakes murder, but I don’t feel like it’s really high stakes here.” You never once believe Poirot himself is in trouble. Same problem here. Enola is nearly drowned and we were checking our phones.

Meaghan’s point stands:

Just because it’s set in Malta and sunny doesn’t mean we can’t be dark with the tone of the film.

The second movie went darker. This one lightens back up, right at the moment when its characters have aged into adults who are getting married. The whimsy that worked when Enola was fourteen reads as childish now. It actively undercuts her.

And then there is the wink. In the middle of an attempted drowning, Enola breaks the fourth wall and winks at the camera. Shirin: “She literally winks mid-drowning.” Fourth wall breaks have been part of this franchise since film one, and they exist to release tension. Fine. But maybe not while your protagonist is being held underwater. Maybe thirty seconds later. Anywhere else, really.

Performances: Who Showed Up, and Who Signed a Contract

Millie Bobby Brown, Louis Partridge, and Henry Cavill are all in this movie. We are not sure any of them are in it.

Shirin accidentally watched half an hour of the original the night before, and the contrast was brutal. “Everybody was really in it to win it for the first one,” she said. “And then by this one, I was just like, y’all just don’t care. So why am I here too?“

Cavill takes the worst of it. Both of us were surprised by how well he handled Sherlock in the first two films, which is not a thing either of us expected to say. Here he seems switched off.

There is a scene where he is held captive by Moriarty and being tortured with water, and Shirin spent the whole thing distracted by something else entirely.

The whole time, I was transfixed on Henry Cavill’s face because I’m like, is that Henry Cavill, or is that a stand-in for Henry Cavill? Like, he looks like he’s AI generated or something.

Meaghan’s verdict was blunter: “It definitely felt like contractually obligated.”

Sharon Duncan-Brewster, as Moriarty, is the only person giving a full performance, and that becomes its own problem. Set against a cast that is barely present, she plays as over-the-top. A caricature of a villain. No shade to the actress at all, because she is doing the job. The rest of the film simply refuses to meet her there.

Which brings us to Helena Bonham Carter as Eudoria Holmes, who has no reason to be here. This is a writing failure and not a performance one. She does exactly what she did in the first two films, nothing more, and the movie gains nothing from her presence. Familiar face, empty function.

Himesh Patel arrives properly as Dr. John Watson after a brief introduction at the end of the second film, and he is one of the few bright spots. Also, if he looks familiar for reasons you cannot place, he played Tamwar Masood on EastEnders for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016, across more than 500 episodes.

Spoilers Ahead: The Plot Has Nothing to Do With the Wedding

Fair warning. Plot points and character beats from here on.

Enola and Tewkesbury are getting married in Malta because his late father served there during the British occupation. Enola gets cold feet, not about him but about becoming a lady and losing her detective work. Watson turns up to tell her Sherlock has been kidnapped. A soldier is murdered. The estate burns. Lady Tewkesbury is taken. All of it was orchestrated by Moriarty, who was deliberately released from prison as part of a conspiracy inside the British military.

The conspiracy is this: British officers stole Afghan gold and moved it to Malta. Tewkesbury’s father was one of them. Add a Maltese freedom fighter who wants his country out from under British rule, add Moriarty’s entirely correct observations about the Empire taking whatever it wants whenever it wants, and you have the raw material for something with real teeth.

“Tale as old as time,” said Shirin.

None of it lands. The film states that these things happened, states that they were bad, and moves briskly along to the next set piece. Nothing is developed enough to hold your interest as a plot point, and nothing carries any conviction. Compare that to the second film, which wove the match girls’ strike of the 1880s directly into Enola’s own struggle to be taken seriously as a working woman. The mystery and the social commentary were the same story there. Here are two separate stories that happen to share a location, and the only reason the wedding is in Malta is so the gold can be in Malta too.

Moriarty is defeated. Tewkesbury renounces his title, unable to live with what his father did. He and Enola marry. Roll credits.

Female Empowerment Without Any Actual Power

Shirin raised the objection that has been sitting under this whole franchise:

It’s all about female empowerment, but the women still have no power in them.

You can argue Enola earns some through her detective work. Maybe. Every other woman in these films exists inside a box. Eudoria is a fugitive who will be on the run for the rest of her life, accompanied by Edith, her companion, lover, question mark, nobody will say. So is there a benefit to being an outspoken woman here? Watching this, it is hard to find one.

There was so much available to this script. What marriage actually meant for a Victorian woman’s legal standing, her property, her work, and her name. The film raises it, gestures at it, and returns to two attractive people gazing longingly at one another.

The same evasiveness shows up in the queer subtext, which is present in Eudoria and Edith and even stronger between Sherlock and Watson. Patel plays Watson’s affection for Sherlock with real warmth, and the tea scenes are doing something. The movie will not commit. “I hate it,” Shirin said. “It’s like, either do it or don’t do it, but commit one way or another.” It is 2026. Pick a lane.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Where We Landed

The good stuff is real. The costumes and the sets are gorgeous. Malta is used properly, with the production filming there and letting the characters move through genuinely different places. There is a coziness in seeing this cast reassemble, and it does jog your memory about how good the first two were.

The weaknesses are everything else. Middle-of-the-road performances. Plot holes. No through line strong enough to keep you watching. And the tone, which should have grown up alongside its characters, simply did not. Enola is supposed to be an adult now, a detective, a woman making her own choices, and she is winking and skipping through a torture scene. It takes her credibility away, and both of us felt that as frustration rather than disappointment.

When we recorded, the film was sitting at 5.8 on IMDb, with critics at 73% on Rotten Tomatoes and audiences down at 54%. We are with the audience on this one.

Shirin’s husband Dan, who has strong feelings about mediocre films, summed up the entire experience: