Enola Holmes · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She turns and looks at you.

Mid-scene, mid-sentence, Millie Bobby Brown's Enola swings her eyes off whoever she is talking to and into the lens. The odd part is that the camera is already waiting for her. Giles Nuttgens leaves a little air at the side of the frame, and the compositions reframe to meet the turn, so the break lands as continuity rather than interruption. Watch for it once and you'll see the whole film is built around a person standing just outside the 1880s.

That person is you. Deleuze has a precise name for where you're standing.

In ordinary continuity, everything outside the frame is what he calls the relative out-of-field: the rest of the drawing room, the corridor, the next railway carriage. Space you could cut to. The absolute out-of-field is a place no pan can reach. Deleuze usually means something large by this, the whole that a film opens onto but cannot contain. Enola cashes it out socially and very literally. The spot she keeps checking in with does not exist anywhere in Victorian England. In September 2020, after the pandemic pushed the film off cinema screens and onto Netflix, it was mostly a sofa.

Deleuze's third great category in Cinema 1 is the relation-image, or mental-image: meaning made not by what a character sees, and not by what she does, but by relations the viewer holds together. Its native genre is the detective story. You are handed a clue and asked to complete a chain, and the film cannot finish that operation without you. Deleuze's exemplar is Hitchcock, and his sharpest observation about him is that Hitchcock builds the spectator into the film as its final term. Enola takes that structural fact and turns it into blocking. Sherlock deduces at people. Enola deduces at us. Henry Cavill plays Sherlock quiet and inward on purpose; all the reasoning-out-loud goes to the girl who can see the audience.

The lens earns its keep because it explains a joke the film never explains. Why is the exposition fun? Exposition is the standing tax on mysteries. Someone has to say what the clues mean, and it usually stops the picture dead. Adam Bosman's editing converts the tax into the pleasure by routing it through the relation-image. When Enola tells us what something means, she isn't delaying the plot, she's recruiting a co-detective. The charm is doing structural work.

The clues themselves run on two of Deleuze's smallest and most useful terms. A mark is an object that means something by custom: you see it, you know what usually comes next. Heritage cinema is a whole vocabulary of marks, and the film is stuffed with them. Corset, calling card, country house, widow's weeds. A demark is the anomaly that breaks the habit and forces you to interpret instead. Bradbeer's costume design is a demark machine. Boys' clothes and widow's weeds stop signalling who a woman is and become equipment for moving through a policed city. The corset is the pivot: first period furniture, then literal restriction, then a problem to be worked around.

Which makes it a gest, Deleuze's Brechtian term for a posture that exposes a social relation rather than a private feeling. The corseted body is the film's argument in bodily form, and Fiona Shaw's finishing school is a factory for manufacturing such postures. The staging keeps returning to thresholds and confinements (the estate, the train, the institution of feminine correction), so that walking out of a room reads as a political act.

Structurally the film braids two cases, and Deleuze's small form fits both. In the small form, an act discloses a situation you can't see whole. Eudoria's disappearance is an index of lack, an elliptical trace standing in for a situation held offscreen; Helena Bonham Carter's radical mother organizes the emotional spine precisely by not being there. The disguises are indices of equivocity, where one act belongs legibly to two different situations at once. In widow's weeds Enola is a grieving woman and a fugitive in the same shot, and the suspense lives in the gap between the two readings.

Here is the claim worth arguing. The look to camera entered cinema as a weapon. Brecht wanted it to break absorption; Godard used it to stop you believing. Classical continuity treated an actor's glance at the lens as an error, because the contract depends on the camera being an unnoticed witness. Bradbeer inverts the whole tradition. His break produces intimacy, not distance. Nothing is suspended and the circuit tightens. Enola perceives, confides, acts, and the action works. That is Deleuze's movement-image running at full power. His time-image only begins when action stops resolving anything and the protagonist is reduced to watching. Nobody in this film is reduced to watching. Bradbeer's specific invention is the demonstration that a modernist rupture can be soldered back into the sensory-motor chain and used as an accelerator.

He had practice, and the lineage is unusually traceable. Tom Jones (1963) proved the wink could power a fast costume romp instead of a solemn heritage piece. Alfie (1966) sustained confessional address across an entire film and used it to steer sympathy. Annie Hall (1977) supplied the exact editing grammar Bosman needs, cutting between address-to-camera and dramatized flashback, which is the rhythm of those brisk montages of Enola's education with her mother. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) made the teenager a tour guide and the viewer an accomplice in a caper. And Fleabag (2016) is Bradbeer's own: the sidelong complicit glance, the viewer promoted from observer to co-conspirator, transplanted here wholesale into corsetry. Without The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), which licensed the filling-in of a private life Doyle never wrote, there is no invented sister to transplant it into.

Forward, the sequel arrived in 2022, and the film stands as one of the signal cases of the pandemic reallocating would-be theatrical titles to streaming. Its strangest afterlife is legal. The Conan Doyle Estate sued, arguing that Sherlock's warmth, his respect for women and his emotional availability, came from stories still under copyright. Somebody had to litigate whether kindness was owned.

Did this film change cinema? No. It settled something, which is smaller and still worth noticing. A device invented to keep you out has become, in a mainstream adventure aimed at teenagers, the most reliable way of pulling you in.

So next time watch the frames, not the glance. The composition already knows she is about to turn. And sit with the question the film keeps posing without ever stating it: can a detective story be solved by its detective alone, or has the genre always needed a second person in the room, the one Enola finally has the manners to acknowledge?