Mr. Holmes - film review

Last Saturday we went to see Mr. Holmes.

Not the person, but the film. The film was about an older Sherlock Holmes who had forgotten what happened in a certain case, and why he felt so guilty about it. He figured he must have done something very wrong.

For those who have not yet seen the film, I’m not going to tell the plot; I’m going to talk about the story telling in it, which really pleased me. Incidentally, the film partly talks about story telling, how Doctor Watson wrote the stories and how Holmes disagreed with the, in Holmes’ eyes, lies that ended up on the paper. However, at the end of his life, Holmes learnt something from Doctor Watson, and it translates into how Holmes decides to reply to a letter of a man he had recently visited.

I like how the separate stories are tied up together. To me it looked very realistic and not forced like you see so often. The woman didn’t turn out to be the long lost sister or daughter of the woman from the other story. Nor was the father the uncle or other relation to one of the women. There were none of those relations and yet the story connected them all up, without having any of them meet each other. That really pleased me. That’s what I mean with: “…it looked very realistic and not forced…”. Cause in real life, most people are not your uncle, long lost sister or even distant relative. Most people are not even acquaintances, but they can still be connected to you in some way. It’s the game ‘Six degrees of…’. That’s what this film does masterfully among a lot of other things.

The other things are the thoughtful way of portraying characters and situations, or the showing of relations between people, the situations they force by their actions and the resulting pain from those actions. This story is a story about how life tends to flow, more than a story of how Mr. Holmes is or isn’t coping with these situations. It’s definitely not your typical Sherlock Holmes film, in which Holmes is the master and everyone around him are just blindly, or in confused state, following him. This time Mr. Holmes is the student and all the rest of them are the teachers. To me, it made Mr. Holmes more real, more human, and more likable.