Wicked Little Letters movie review: the cheek is in the mail

As far as I am concerned, there is nothing that either Olivia Colman or Jessie Buckley — screen goddesses both — could possibly do that wouldn’t be worth watching. I don’t mean that I’ve loved every film they’ve appeared in, because I haven’t… but I do mean that even in the films of theirs that I haven’t loved, I’ve always found them hugely fascinating. They redeem bad movies. They make good movies better. They have always rewarded me when I spend time with them, no matter what else is happening around them.

And now they get to butt heads onscreen for the first time? Is it Christmas? (They both star in 2021’s The Lost Daughter but never appear together.) Even better: there’s no need for qualifiers here. I adore Wicked Little Letters and can easily see this becoming a future comfort movie for me, a flick to revisit when I’m feeling low and in need of a cheerfully indecent, gloriously naughty pick-me-up.

Because, my goodness, this is a treat. It’s an upending of the English period costume drama, which is long overdue. It’s full of female rage at the societal restrictions and expectations that women operate under — in the past but also today as well — which is never not welcome. It’s about women who keep secrets and still their discontent because the consequences of not doing so are too immense, which so many women (and probably many men) will relate to. It’s also funny as hell and bursting with impudent energy. The collision course that Colman (The Father, Murder on the Orient Express) and Buckley (Men, Beast) are on here is hilariously mock-epic. And also serious in a kidding-not-kidding sort of way.

It’s like this: Colman’s Edith Swan is a prim, religious, extremely conservative spinster — a word I hate but which is, alas, historically apropos — who still lives with her parents (Timothy Spall [The Last Bus, Mrs Lowry & Son] and Gemma Jones [Rocketman, God’s Own Country]) at the ripe old age of late-40something. It is the early 1920s in the sleepy English village of Littlehampton, Sussex, not too far outside London. Their next-door neighbor is Buckley’s Rose Gooding, a rowdy Irish immigrant, mother to a young daughter (Alisha Weir) and married to a man (Malachi Kirby: Boiling Point, Dough) who is not her child’s father — all rather coarse and socially unacceptable, doncha know. Still, Edith and Rose had become friends, to the degree allowable between such disparate women. Until…

See, Edith has been receiving, for quite a while now as Wicked Little Letters opens, the most vile poison-pen letters, vicious little notes full of the most shocking vulgarity, at least as one grades on a 1920s curve. Poison-pen letters used to be a thing, in the pre-Internet era; in modern parlance think “nasty foul-mouthed trolls sliding into your DMs.” Except the DMs come through the mail slot in your front door in time to be read with afternoon tea. (There’s a debate to be had whether that is more or less intimate than abuse that arrives on our constant-companion phones these days.) And Edith believes that Rose, an earthy lass who loves inventive invective and does not hesitate to swear out loud in public, is behind the letters.

“This [story] is more true than you’d think,” we viewers are informed at the beginning of Letters, and that’s accurate: screenwriter Jonny Sweet’s script, the feature debut of the British comedian and TV writer, is based on events that really happened. Don’t Google if you don’t already know the tale (though you probably won’t, because it has been mostly forgotten till now, though it was a huge and very public scandal at the time). I say that even though, while Letters may be fashioned at the beginning as a mystery — who o who could be sending such awful missives? — it rather quickly morphs into a character study of why the perpetrator, revealed fairly early on, is doing what they are doing. And then it becomes a delightfully sneaky pseudo-heistlike tale as other characters try to ensnare the poison-penner in order to prove they’re the bad guy. Which ultimately raises questions about how “bad” the perp actually is…

This might be where Letters is most wonderfully intriguing. Director Thea Sharrock, with her third feature (after family adventure The One and Only Ivan and romantic drama Me Before You) is deliciously provocative in her casting choices: Tamil actor Anjana Vasan (Cyrano, Mogul Mowgli) is a hoot as “Woman Police Officer” Gladys Moss, who takes it upon herself to investigate the ongoing shenanigans in spite of the fact that she is taken far less seriously as an investigator than her white male colleague (played with magnificent doofiness by Hugh Skinner [Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Les Misérables]). The real Moss was not a brown-skinned women, just as in real life, Rose’s husband was not a black man, as actor Kirby is. And there are other roles here filled out in “diverse,” “colorblind” ways, which only makes the sly shiv of this movie all the more powerful.

This may have been inspired by actual events, but those events are molded here to tell a tale that has something to say to us a century on, as historical tales must if we are to connect with them. The craftiest thing Wicked Little Letters does may be to prod us to interrogate our 21st-century prejudices by underscoring the still-enduring social and cultural vectors along which ordinary everyday oppression continues to occur. While also enjoying some truly inspired swearing.

more films like this:
• The Banshees of Inisherin [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Disney+ UK]
• Hot Fuzz [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]