Since the beginning, the Enola Holmes franchise has grappled with Shakespeare’s popular adage, “What’s in a name?” At the start of the first film, Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) introduces herself to audiences by explaining that her mother, Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter), chose her unusual first name because it spells “alone” backwards.
Six years later, Enola Holmes 3, which is streaming now on Netflix, opens with the older but still spirited detective in a wedding dress, reflecting on all the work she’s put into finally feeling worthy of her famous last name. “If the first two films are about her first name, this third film is about her second one,” writer and producer Jack Thorne tells Tudum. “It’s about being a Holmes.”
As Enola embraces her identity, she finds herself staring down the barrel of pressing questions. Should she get married? And will she lose what makes her a Holmes if she ties the knot?
Our heroine isn’t alone in this struggle. Her brother Sherlock (Henry Cavill) is also contemplating the diverging paths he and his younger sister are taking with their family name, and Enola’s fiancé, Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), must confront the problematic legacy of his title. Meanwhile, Enola’s returning adversary Moriarty, known in Enola Holmes 2 as Mira Troy (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), uses code names in a twisted game that leads the young detective on a search for her missing brother. But does she find him? And what other discoveries does Enola make along the way?
Keep reading as we solve the series’ latest mystery with help from Thorne, as well as director Philip Barantini and stars Brown, Partridge, and Cavill.
Having fallen in love over the course of the first two films, Enola Holmes and Lord Tewkesbury are set to tie the knot in Valletta, Malta, at the start of Enola Holmes 3. But Enola is “having doubts about what it means to become a lady.” Torn between her mother’s warnings about taking the path others choose, and the genuine connection she shares with her betrothed, on the morning of her wedding she’s struggling to decide whether she’s going to show up at the cathedral.
“We find her on the precipice of marriage, dangling on the edge of a cliff, basically, deciding where next to turn, whether to go through with it,” says Thorne. “She is very uneasy about the whole notion of it, and she’s been made uneasy by the way that the Tewkesbury extended family behaves towards her.” In flashbacks to the night before the wedding that come later in the movie, Brigadier Sampson (Jason Watkins), Tewkesbury’s godfather, jokes in his toast about Enola’s strong will. But he’s not the only one who leaves her uncertain about saying “I do.”
Sherlock, who has come to Malta both for his sister’s wedding and to work on a top-secret case, also seems to judge Enola’s choice to marry a lord, which may mean giving up her standing as a detective. This prompts the siblings to quarrel. “What’s lovely about that argument is that while Sherlock, in the past, has been a mentor to Enola, and he’s shared his thoughts sometimes in less than gentle ways, this is him being disappointed genuinely,” Cavill shares. “It’s painful for Enola to hear because this is the man she respects.” Brown points out that, previously, the brother and sister have been a great team, but this moment highlights their profound differences. “Sherlock has less emotion and Enola is opposite to him,” she explains. And even though calling her real-life pal “a pig” took practice, Brown says the scene was fun to shoot. “I love working with Henry. He brings such a different dynamic to Sherlock, and we have such a great chemistry and friendship. We have a blast.”
That fight turns out to be the last conversation the siblings have before Sherlock disappears. As Enola rushes to her wedding the next day, Dr. Watson (Himesh Patel) informs her that her brother has been kidnapped. Of course, she feels she must go looking for him, but his abduction also gives her a convenient way out of walking down the aisle. “The beginning of the film is her standing Tewkesbury up because she’s pulled into something else, which is [solving] the kidnapping of Sherlock,” Thorne explains. “So on one side, her name might be eradicated. On the other side, the obligations of her name require her to go on possibly her most dangerous mission yet.”
That’s exactly what Enola is trying to figure out. While examining Sherlock’s hotel room, she and Watson uncover a few clues, including a scrap of lace and the word Khost scrawled across a mirror in Morse code. Soon after, Enola also encounters a mustachioed sergeant who she believes Sherlock was pursuing in the days leading up to the wedding, so she follows the man through the bustling streets of Valletta. When she finally catches up to him, suddenly he’s shot. As he lies dying, he manages to get out one word: “Wrath.”
The next day, Tewkesbury’s mother (Hattie Morahan) is kidnapped, and her abductor set fire to the hotel on their way out. Enola suspects that they did this in order to destroy evidence of something — perhaps the war medals that she finds in Lady Tewkesbury’s hotel room just as Mikiel Mizzi (Joe Azzopardi) appears. Mizzi, who is with the Partito Anti-Riformista, a group fighting for a free Malta, believes that Sherlock was taken by someone known as Professor Adeline Rathe, who showed up in Malta a year ago with a lot of inside information.
Later, when Enola is back on the busy city streets, she spots a woman adorned in the same lace she discovered inside Sherlock’s ransacked room. Thinking this woman could be the professor in question, she chases after her and ends up in the underground sewage system, where she finds out who is actually behind all this madness. Turns out, it’s not the woman in lace. It’s the person she’s working for. Professor Adeline Rathe is actually Moriarty.
Let’s back up. Viewers of the previous Enola films will remember that Mira Troy aka Moriarty (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) was involved in the crimes that the Holmes siblings investigated in Enola Holmes 2. Enola Holmes 3 opens with a mysterious scene in which a chained figure — turns out, that’s Moriarty (Sharon Duncan-Brewster)! — is led past jail cells to the same mustachioed sergeant who Sherlock later tracks and Enola eventually witnesses being killed. But in that intro scene, leveraging his power to get her out of jail, the sergeant enlists the prisoner’s “brilliant” mind to find missing riches and expose a cover-up. Their exchange ends with the sergeant asking, “Does the name Tewkesbury mean anything to you?”
It was Barantini’s idea to kick the movie off with this eerie scene, which didn’t appear in the initial script. “I suggested we start the film with a cold opening, very much like Jurassic Park or any of those movies where we see something happen, then midway through the movie, you’ve actually forgotten about that scene, but it’s still subconsciously in your mind,” the director says.
So when Enola catches up with Professor Rathe, and realizes she’s actually Moriarty, she didn’t see it coming. As Barantini points out, that cold open actually bridges the two films. “In the second movie, she escapes, and we wanted to flip that back as if to say, ‘Oh, she didn’t actually escape. She was let go by this soldier.’” As it turns out, after being released and assuming a fake name, Moriarty traveled to Malta, where she kidnaps Sherlock and then faces off with Enola in the sewer. As the two fight it out, Eudoria appears and rescues her daughter, and Moriarty disappears in an explosion. Now the young detective just has to figure out where her brother is being held.
Viewers learn that truth well before Enola. A few scenes later, Moriarty pays a visit to the cell in which she’s holding Sherlock and Lady Tewkesbury. Through their conversation, we find out that the woman in lace (who was secretly working with Moriarty) easily manipulated the mother of the groom into having the wedding in Malta — the colony where Tewkesbury’s late father served in the military. As Sherlock continues to piece together the clues in Moriarty’s game, he concludes that she kidnapped him in order to make Enola “perform” for her. Yet, he isn’t sure it’s all just an act of revenge….
As Enola says, “With Moriarty, it’s never just one thing.” It’s true that Moriarty is angry about the hypocrisy she’s witnessed from the Holmes family. “Did I mention I met your mother?” she asks a chained-up Sherlock. “She blows up a post office, and you celebrate. Yet, I steal from the truly corrupt, and you watch me carted to prison.” Of course, Enola isn’t around to hear this — she’s still trying to find out where her brother is and why he’s been taken. And with help from Eudoria, Tewkesbury, Watson, and Mizzi, she soon figures out that there’s more to Moriarty’s game than humiliating the Holmes family.
After Tewkesbury concludes that the woman in lace is a spy, Enola remembers that she first spotted her speaking to the governor and a masked man, whom Enola then identified as the Brigadier, thanks to his medals. An identical medal, she quickly realizes, was also worn by the unidentified sergeant and was among those found in Lady Tewkesbury’s room the night of her disappearance. Upon further inspection, it’s discovered that the medal was awarded to those involved in the Battle of Khost, an armed conflict during the Anglo-Afghan war in which both Tewkesbury’s late father and his godfather, the Brigadier, fought.
When Enola, Tewkesbury, and Watson confront Brigadier Sampson about the truth behind the Battle of Khost, they learn Tewkesbury’s father led the operation, which ended with British soldiers stealing Afghan gold. On their way back to Malta, Tewkesbury senior experienced a “crisis of consciousness” about the theft, but instead of returning the gold, he sank their ship, claimed the stolen riches went down with it, and then blamed the Maltese soldiers for the incident. So Moriarty was enlisted to expose Tewkesbury senior’s past wrongdoing — more hypocrisy from a supposedly respectable family — and track down the gold, which she now wants to keep for herself. She sent Enola on a goose chase to help her do so.
“Her morality is suspect, but her anger isn’t suspect at all. She has the perfect right to be angry,” says Thorne of Moriarty. “It’s something Sharon captures beautifully in her playing of her. Mira is, for good reason, furious with the world, and she wants to get justice within this world. Those are the villains that really interest me — ones where you go, ‘Actually, she’s making a fair point.’ What’s Tewkesbury’s wealth been built on? Exploitation of others. ‘So why am I the bad person when all I’m doing is taking what isn’t rightfully yours?’”
Once Enola learns the truth about Tewkesbury’s legacy, she connects more dots. Moriarty laid out all the traps — the abductions, smudges, lace, fire, and medals — and those discoveries allow Enola to lead Moriarty to the missing gold. That’s right, she knows exactly where it is. On their first night in Malta, Tewkesbury took his fiancée on a scenic walk and pointed out a cliffside cave that his father used to tell him was filled with treasure, so Enola figures that must be where the gold was hidden.
Knowing that it will draw Moriarty out, Enola goes to collect the gold. Their final standoff takes place in the nearby dungeon where Sherlock and Lady Tewkesbury are being held: Enola’s future mother-in-law takes her captor down by knocking her out with a rock while Sherlock holds her at gunpoint. Moriarty is finally apprehended and taken back to prison, with no chance of keeping the stolen treasure for herself.
Though Moriarty is technically only taking advantage of existing corruption, Thorne doesn’t see her as a hero. “Oh, I don’t think she’s a Robin Hood character,” he says. “I think she’s taking from the rich in order to get richer herself.” And her desire to both expose the evils of the ruling class and gain their illicit fortunes is what got her into trouble. “She’s divided between her hatred for the Holmes family generally, and her need to make herself rich. This is her downfall,” Thorne continues. “I think if she’d managed to avoid the Holmes family, there are a lot safer and easier ways to get rich than involving herself in those affairs.”
Determined not to make the same mistakes as his father, Tewkesbury takes the gold back to Afghanistan. According to Partridge, the painful revelation about the Battle of Khost greatly impacts the young lord. “It’s one of those moments in life where you kind of choose your path. I think he chooses a noble, difficult one, and I respect him a lot for it,” he says of his character. “It shatters old illusions and dares him to create a new future for himself.” Lord Tewkesbury also grants the Maltese authorities permission to investigate and prosecute all those involved in the crime, which means both his godfather, Brigadier Sampson, and the British governor are arrested.
Yes! After Tewkesbury has given up his tarnished title, and Sherlock realizes that his little sister is indeed extraordinary enough to continue carrying the Holmes moniker no matter her marital status, the two decide to go for it.
Enola and Tewkesbury get married in a simple ceremony, with close friends and family. “I think Tewkesbury wants to be married, he wants to say, ‘We are going to be together forever,’” Brown explains. “Enola feels that she is going to be with him forever, she doesn’t need marriage to confirm or deny that, and I think she is able to compromise and say, ‘OK, I will do this. I will be your forever partner, but I will do it in the way that I feel comfortable with.’”
Still, even with assurances that she doesn’t have to become a lady to earn her new family’s approval, Thorne doesn’t believe Enola is fully certain of her identity just yet …because how could she be? “When you’re in your early 20s, you are still in a place of great confusion about who you truly are and what you are going to give the world,” he says. “She’s still uncovering new things to understand about herself.”
But her immediate next step in life is marrying her love on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea — the metaphor of taking the plunge turned literal in a nod to the story’s stunning location. “It's an improvised wedding for an improvised marriage that will be an improvised partnership,” says Thorne. “They’re escaping the iron laws of society to improvise their way to something else.”
Adds Brown, “I think you’re able to have a really full-circle moment at the end of the movie and see that Enola is supported by such strong people, men and women who are able to push her forward, and she allows them. She embraces their help.”
At the end of the film, the newlyweds are seen swimming together in the sea. As the camera pans down beneath the surface of the water, we’re left with the image of a sunken ship that bears a placard reading, The Wrath of Adeline 1863. Barantini says this shot was added both to bring the story full-circle and — naturally — for a bit of intrigue. “Initially, we did have it where Enola throws water on the camera, and that’s the end,” he says. “This wraps the story up. The reason [Moriarty] was called Adeline Rathe was because of this boat — the boat that Tewkesbury’s father sunk.” According to the director, this ending is also meant to leave fans wondering, “Is there going to be more to this?”
Thorne agrees. “None of these endings are full stops. All of these endings are commas as the possibilities of these characters live on.”
Watch Enola Holmes 3 now.
