Let us dispense with the niceties. The breathless reporting on Millie Bobby Brown and Louis Partridge’s latest outing in the Enola Holmes franchise is not merely a puff piece for a middling film. It is a symptom, a telling indicator of how the British establishment has convinced itself that producing twee, anachronistic period dramas is the equivalent of maintaining a global empire. The Guardian and its ilk will witter on about ‘soft power’ as though a Netflix series about Sherlock Holmes’ plucky sister somehow compensates for the Royal Navy’s diminished fleet or the fact that we can no longer even police our own borders effectively.
Let me be blunt: The notion that a film starring a young woman who made her name on Stranger Things (an American show, note) constitutes a significant exercise of British cultural influence is patently absurd. It is the intellectual equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We are a post-imperial nation in terminal decline, clinging to the comforting illusions of our literary past as a substitute for actual geopolitical relevance. Enola Holmes is not a projection of power; it is a decorative dollhouse, a comforting fantasy for audiences who prefer their Britain to be a land of steam trains, foggy streets, and plucky girls solving mysteries without any of the grim realities of industrial decline, immigration crises, or constitutional chaos.
What is genuinely galling is the sheer vacuity of the discourse. Instead of examining why so many of our film industry’s biggest ‘successes’ are formulaic, heritage-porn productions—costume dramas, royal biopics, Agatha Christie adaptations—we pat ourselves on the back for ‘punching above our weight’. The truth is that we are punching below our weight. Our cultural output has become a form of historical embalming, a refusal to engage with the messy, complex, and often ugly present. Compare this to the golden age of British cinema: the kitchen sink realism of the 1960s, the furious iconoclasm of Lindsay Anderson, the savage satire of Peter Cook. That was a culture that still believed it had something to say about the world. Now we produce sanitised, Netflix-friendly confections designed to be consumed by Americans who want to feel sophisticated.
The Enola Holmes franchise is particularly insidious because it trades on the Sherlock brand—itself a symbol of Victorian intellectual superiority—to sell a message of progressive girl-power. It is the ultimate neoliberal fantasy: an independent female protagonist who solves problems through pluck and intelligence, all while existing within a system of inherited wealth and titled gentry. Never mind that the real Victorian era was a cesspool of poverty, disease, and brutal exploitation. Never mind that the actual Sherlock Holmes stories are steeped in racial stereotypes and imperialist assumptions. We have laundered history into a product, and we call it soft power.
What would real soft power look like? It would look like a film industry that dares to criticise the monarchy, that take a scalpel to the class system, that grapples with the legacy of empire. Instead, we get ‘Enola Holmes 2’ and a collective sigh of self-congratulation. The Daily Mail will hail it as a triumph of British values, forgetting that British values once included hanging men for stealing sheep. The BBC will run a breathless piece on how the film ‘boosts tourism’. It is all so pathetically small-bore, so desperately provincial.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. Perhaps a feel-good film about a resourceful young woman is precisely what a demoralised nation needs. But I cannot escape the feeling that our obsession with this sort of heritage cinema is a form of cultural necrosis. We are not projecting power; we are projecting a fantasy of ourselves. And when the rest of the world looks at us, they do not see a resurgent Britain. They see a museum that has forgotten it is a museum, populated by actors in corsets, trying to sell them streaming subscriptions.
There is a memorable line in ‘The Third Man’: ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ What does modern Britain produce? Enola Holmes. I rest my case.
