Enola Holmes 3 (2026)

Netflix’s recent Millie Bobby Brown vehicle, Enola Holmes 3, is a disappointing and confusing entry in the stellar Enola Holmes franchise. Directed by Philip Barantini, the film stars Brown as Enola Holmes, estranged sister of Sherlock Holmes, Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes, and Louis Partridge as her love interest, Viscount Tewkesbury. While it deserves credit for its exciting action scenes and attempts to expand the diversity of its Dickensian setting, the most recent entry in the series completely scuttles Enola’s underdog status from the first films that made her so charming and gave a touch of realism to the story of a young, unmarried woman living in London while self-employed as a detective.

Enola Holmes 3 opens with Enola on her way to her wedding to the Viscount of Tewkesbury. A dramatic scene ensues in which Enola must rip off her wedding accouterments and attack the man pursuing her carriage, who turns out to be Dr. Watson (Himesh Patel) asking for help because Sherlock has been kidnapped. In a flurry of flashbacks and narration to the camera, we follow Enola as she abandons her wedding, the hotel she’s staying at gets burned down, and her soon to be mother in law is kidnapped. With help from her mother (Helena Bonham-Carter), her pushover fiancé, the amenable Dr. Watson, and anticolonial Maltese freedom fighter (and comic relief) Mikiel Mizzi (Joe Azzopardi), she saves her loved ones and uncovers a conspiracy of silence around treasure plundered from Khost during the British invasion of Afghanistan. However, Enola’s character has changed dramatically since the first two films, and in some ways lost its effectiveness. 

In the first two films, Enola was an underdog. In the first film, Enola Holmes, the titular character saves the Viscount of Tewkesbury from assassination as he was set to vote on a progressive reform bill. Throughout it, she flees imprisonment in a finishing school, finds her missing mother, and escapes the guardianship of her misogynistic brother Mycroft in order to set up a life for herself in London with the support of her radical suffragette mother. By the second film, she’s living unmarried and free, crushing on Tewkesbury, and supporting herself as a detective in a Victorian pastiche of modern 20-something aspirational living. It’s a little unrealistic, but it's grounded by Enola’s pluck and intelligence that allow her to outsmart the suffocating social standards faced by women in Victorian England. Combined with the sequel’s plotline of Enola helping factory workers strike, the series established itself as one about an underdog helping other underdogs when no one, not even the Great and Good Sherlock Holmes himself, would intervene on their behalf.