Enola Holmes 2

Harry Bradbeer’s sequel, unlike the first film, adapts none of Nancy Springer’s novels. Jack Thorne wrote an original story and set it on a real event: the walkout at the Bryant and May match factory in Bow, east London, on 5 July 1888. Sarah Chapman was a real person and a leading member of the strike committee. Annie Besant had published the factory conditions in The Link; the company demanded the workers repudiate her article, they refused, and the strike followed. What the film invents is worth separating. Sarah’s music hall job, her romance with the owner’s son William Lyon and the typhus cover story are fiction; in reality the owners knew about phosphorus poisoning and treated it as an ordinary hazard of the trade. The picture closes on the women marching, yet Bryant and May did not give up white phosphorus until 1901. Consolata Boyle won Costume Design at the 19th Irish Film and Television Awards, and Millie Bobby Brown, also one of its producers, took Favourite Movie Actress at the 2023 Kids’ Choice Awards. A good fit if you want to set the film’s strike beside the 1888 one and see where they part. Not for anyone who finds Enola turning to the camera a break in the flow, because she keeps doing it throughout.