This is Sherlock Holmes as you have not seen him before: there’s no deerstalker, no pipe, and he refuses to solve mysteries. “Bah,” he exclaims dyspeptically to Watson and anyone else who greets him on the day before Christmas, sounding a lot like another “humbug” Victorian bachelor.
Because this is also A Christmas Carol as you have not seen it before. Writer-director Mark Shanahan’s mashup is very well executed, taking the characters, styles and themes of both and weaving them into a yuletide detective story. There is a suspicious death (Ebenezer Scrooge’s), a missing will and a precious carbuncle tucked inside a Christmas goose.
