Enola Holmes 2 (2022)

Enola Holmes 2 arrives as a sequel to a 2020 Netflix confection, and it carries its predecessor's habits forward without much apology. Millie Bobby Brown's teenage detective opens her own agency and discovers that Victorian London will not take a girl with a magnifying glass seriously. The city around her is cast in notably multiracial terms, with Susan Wokoma, Adeel Akhtar and Sharon Duncan-Brewster in substantial roles, and the screenplay never pauses to explain or celebrate the arrangement. That restraint is either a quiet sign of maturity or evidence that the casting director simply did the job. Either way, nobody in the film remarks upon it.

The engine underneath is a feminist one, and it is not hidden. Enola wants credit for her work, her mother's circle of suffragettes provides the muscle for a prison break, and the director has spoken openly about sisterhood and the movement from I to we. The plot then folds that into a labor story. Greedy match factory owners and a corrupt Treasury minister knowingly poison their workers with white phosphorus to protect the margins, and the answer to this is a strike. The film is comfortable naming its villains as capitalists, which it does with some enthusiasm.

The trouble is structural. The real 1888 matchgirls' strike was a slow accumulation of collective courage, and here it becomes a lesson in one remarkable girl leading the masses toward the correct conclusion. The messaging rarely preaches outright; it travels inside a breezy adventure with dance lessons and fourth-wall glances. The film's silences are nearly as telling. There is no queer thread, no environmental anxiety, no body politics, no attempt to frame Enola's racing mind as anything but pluck. A romance with a young lord is permitted, and it is entirely conventional. The result is a competent entertainment with a conscience it wears lightly, and a historical movement it borrows for decoration.