Enola Holmes 2 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A girl in a Victorian street stops mid-sentence, turns her head, and looks at a place where nobody is standing. Eyebrow up. She's looking at you, and she has been all along.

Almost everything worth saying about Enola Holmes 2 runs through that flick of the eyes, so let's start there and work outward.

The device belongs to Harry Bradbeer, and it isn't an actor mugging at the lens. On Fleabag he worked out a blocking method: reserve an eyeline for the camera. Keep a seat at the table for it. Stage the scene so the other actors leave that angle clear, and the lead can drop a glance into it mid-conversation without the shot going slack. He brought the method to Enola whole, along with the DP, editor and composer from the first film.

Deleuze has a useful pair of terms for what this does to a frame. Every shot implies things outside it. Some of that outside is relative: the next room, the street she's about to walk into, space you could reach by panning. Some of it is absolute, an outside no camera move can reach because it isn't in the world of the film at all. Bradbeer's contribution is to give that absolute outside a chair. No character can walk to where Enola is looking. Yet the staging holds the spot open, protects it, addresses it. She doesn't break the frame. She uses a door the film built into it.

Deleuze calls images built out of relations the relation-image, or the mental-image, and his case study is Hitchcock. Hitchcock's invention, on this account, was to make the real content of a film a set of relations the characters can't see and the audience can. You know the bomb is under the table; the people at the table don't. The spectator stops watching the film and becomes a term inside it. Bradbeer takes that structural fact and converts it into physical blocking. Where Hitchcock made you complicit by withholding from his characters, Enola turns around and hands it to you.

This is worth arguing about, because on paper the fourth-wall break is a Brechtian tool. It's supposed to estrange, to snap you out of the story and remind you it's a story so you'll think instead of swoon. Bradbeer runs it backwards. The glance doesn't push you out, it pulls you in and makes you an accomplice. You can't be estranged by someone who's confiding in you. Once you see the inversion, the film's suspense stops looking soft and starts looking chosen: it's warm rather than tight, because you're inside the scheme with her instead of outside worrying about her.

Underneath the device sits a very old machine, and Deleuze is good on its shape. He splits the action-image in two. In the large form, a huge situation bears down until someone acts and transforms it: the town, the gunfighter, the showdown. The small form runs the other way. Someone acts, and the act discloses a situation nobody could see. That's the detective story's engine by definition, and this film runs it at full length. One missing factory girl, one inquiry, and the inquiry opens onto corruption, disease and profit. The case is the flashlight. The conspiracy is the room.

Two finer terms make the clue-work legible. Deleuze calls an object that means by habit a mark: you see the thing, you expect what usually follows it. A demark is the object that breaks its habit and forces you to interpret rather than recognize. Adam Bosman's deduction sequences are a machine for turning the first into the second. Freeze the frame, pull an object out of its customary chain, recombine it with something from three scenes ago. Disguise, meanwhile, gives Deleuze's index of equivocity, where one gesture belongs to two situations at once. Enola in a matchgirl's clothes is doing factory work and detective work in the same motion, and Consolata Boyle's costumes have to make each transformation readable instantly, because the pleasure depends on you holding both meanings while everyone in the scene holds one.

The deduction montage itself is inherited, and the debt is specific. Guy Ritchie's 2009 Sherlock Holmes previsualized a fight in slow motion before Holmes threw the punch. Paul McGuigan's Sherlock floated typography over the image to put the inside of a head on the outside of a frame. Both convert thinking into choreography, into something you watch. Deleuze has a name for action that gets staged and figured rather than performed: the attraction-image. Be honest about the ceiling here. This is thought depicted, not thought provoked. Deleuze's harder idea, an image that jams recognition and forces you to actually think, is a different animal, and the film has no designs on it. It wants cognition to be fun to look at, and it is.

Which brings up what makes a modest studio picture genuinely interesting to think with. Deleuze's central historical claim is that pre-war cinema ran on an intact sensory-motor circuit: a character perceives a situation, is affected, acts, and the action changes the world. After 1945 the circuit broke. People could see and not act. Time came loose and stopped being the measure of movement. Nearly everything we call modern cinema was built out of that failure. Enola Holmes 2 is a 2022 film in which the circuit works perfectly. Perception converts to action, the case closes, and even the historical material — the 1888 matchgirls' strike at Bryant & May — arrives as a crowd with somewhere to go.

Notice what makes that possible: the past tense. Victorian London here isn't only costume pleasure. It's about the last address where a filmmaker can plausibly set a story in which acting changes things. Move the same plot to 2022 and the circuit reads as naive. Leave it in 1888 and it reads as historical.

The fourth wall turns out to be the pressure valve. One symptom Deleuze identifies in the circuit's collapse is a consciousness of clichés: characters start noticing they're moving through worn-out situations, and the noticing corrodes, because you can't act with conviction inside a shape you've already recognized as a shape. Enola notices constantly. She comments, editorializes, jokes about her own genre. It costs her nothing. The self-awareness is routed outward to you instead of inward into her, so the irony gets discharged before it can eat the plot. The film knows it's a story and means it anyway.

So what did it do? Not invent. Carry. Ferris Bueller had the youth-coded confidence to camera. Amélie had the saturated storybook city and the whimsy mediated by a voice. Fleabag had the blocking. This film's contribution is transmission: it moved a device television had perfected into a mainstream family-adventure franchise and proved it scales to spectacle. The fit with the delivery pipeline isn't an accident either. The picture was engineered from conception for Netflix and the home screen, and a confiding glance at three feet is a different act than a confiding glance at forty. Deleuze's spectator-as-third-term assumed a dark room full of strangers. This one assumes a sofa. The device wasn't only borrowed, it was re-tuned for the new distance, and that re-tuning is the most cinema-historical thing about the film.

Watch it again and watch the blocking instead of the glances. See how the other actors keep clearing that one angle, how the frame maintains a hole on your side of it. Then a question it doesn't quite answer. A classical mystery keeps you outside so the reveal can land; this one lets you in from the first minute and still expects you to be surprised. Can a detective story survive having the audience as a co-conspirator? Enola bets it can. Watch her check with you before she moves.