John H. Watson, MD, has much to answer for; just ask this Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes created by American novelist Mitch Cullin, whose 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind is the basis of this beguiling film, has little time for the first-person narrator of all the detective's adventures.
He dismisses the books as "penny dreadfuls in an elevated prose style", tells us he never wore a deerstalker (a word Watson never used) or smoked a pipe ("I prefer a cigar") and that even the 221B Baker St address was a fiction to throw tourists off the scent.
The film adaptation, written by Jeffrey Hatcher and directed by Condon, who worked with McKellen on the wonderful Gods and Monsters, delivers us a unique Holmes: free of the cliched accoutrements, and seldom having recourse to the brilliant insights one character calls party tricks, he is instead a human being of complexity, plagued by uncertainty and not a little sadness.
In 1947, Holmes is 94, living as a hobby apiarist on the Sussex Downs with his widowed housekeeper (Linney) and her son Roger (Parker) and haunted by a 30-year-old case that he failed to bring to a successful conclusion.
The kicker is that he's losing his memory, so he has to dredge up the story, writing it into being for Roger (and us) as the film flashes back to bring the remembered events to life.
