Enola Holmes 3 goes darker under a new director and loses some of the fun in the trade

Netflix put the third Enola Holmes out today, and it is the strangest entry in the series by a wide margin. Not because the plot reinvents anything. Because of who is behind the camera.

Philip Barantini directed this one. He made Boiling Point, the restaurant drama built to look like a single unbroken take, and he ran the one-shot machinery again on Adolescence. He is a realist by instinct: long takes, natural light, actors sweating in real time. Handing him a fourth-wall-breaking Victorian caper aimed at teenagers is a genuinely odd match, and Enola Holmes 3 spends its 105 minutes working out what happens when those two things collide.

The setup is domestic before it goes anywhere. Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) is planning her wedding to Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), who has taken a seat in the House of Lords and grown into exactly the kind of respectable young man Enola is not sure she recognizes. Then Sherlock (Henry Cavill) disappears, and the case pulls her out of the drawing room and eventually to Malta, where a good chunk of the film plays out against the stone of Valletta and Mdina.

Brown is still the reason the series works. She has played this character since she was sixteen, and the asides to camera are a reflex now, a glance at the lens that lands more often than it misses. When the movie lets her carry a scene on wit and nerve, it moves. Cavill gets more to do than before, playing a Sherlock who is genuinely rattled for once instead of coasting on unflappability. Helena Bonham Carter turns up as Eudoria and reminds you how much she can do with four minutes and a raised eyebrow.

The Barantini experiment

This is where the film gets interesting and where it trips. Barantini shoots the mystery like it matters, with a weight and grubbiness the first two movies never reached for. The Malta sequences have real texture. A kidnapping actually feels like a kidnapping. This is the darker, more grown-up Enola that got promised when the project was announced, and when it works it points at a version of this franchise worth taking seriously.

The cost is the bounce. The first two films, both directed by Harry Bradbeer, ran on a light, quick, faintly silly energy that made the mystery machinery go down easy. Barantini is not a light, quick director, and the movie keeps reaching for a playfulness its own style is quietly fighting. Several stretches lean on flashbacks to fill in the plot, and every time the film cuts backward it gives up forward momentum it then has to claw back. New composers Aaron May and David Ridley, in for Daniel Pemberton, score it straighter and with less mischief, which suits Barantini and works against the fun.

The verdict

Critics landed split down the middle on this, and I get why. The tonal experiment is real, and about half of it pays off. When Enola Holmes 3 commits to being a grounded detective story, it is the best-made film in the series. When it remembers it is also supposed to be a romp and tries to be one on top of the grit, the seams show. Brown is good enough to paper over a lot of that, and mostly she does. But a series that used to feel effortless now visibly works for it.

Worth your evening if you like these characters, and you probably do if you are three films deep. Just do not go in expecting the sugar rush of the first one.

BCN score: 65 / 100. A better-directed Enola movie that happens to be a little less fun to watch.

The details

• Enola Holmes 3, streaming on Netflix as of July 1, 2026
• Directed by Philip Barantini, written by Jack Thorne
• Starring Millie Bobby Brown, Louis Partridge, Henry Cavill, Himesh Patel, Helena Bonham Carter, Sharon Duncan-Brewster
• Running time: 105 minutes