As far as I am concerned, there is nothing that either Olivia Colman or Jessie Buckley — screen goddeses 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 certainly haven't. But I do mean that even in the films of theirs that I haven't loved, I've always found their performances hugely fascinating. They redeem bad movies. They make good movies better. They always reward 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? Even better.
Their new film Wicked Little Letters could easily become a future comfort movie, a flick to revisit when feeling low and in need of a cheerfully indecent, gloriously naughty pick-me-up.
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. It's something that so many women (and probably many men) will relate to.
Wicked Little Letters is also funny as hell and bursting with impudent energy. The collision course that Colman and Buckley are on here is hilariously mock-epic, while also serious in a kidding-not-kidding sort of way.
Colman's Edith Swan is a prim, religious, extremely conservative spinster (a word I hate but is, alas, historically apropos) who at the ripe old age of late fortysomething still lives with her parents (Timothy Spall and Gemma Jones). 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) who is not her child's father — all rather coarse and socially unacceptable characteristics, doncha know. Still, Edith and Rose become friends, to the degree allowable between such disparate women.
For quite a while Edith has been receiving the most vile poison-pen letters, vicious little notes full of shocking vulgarity, at least when grading 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." Only these DMs come through the mail slot in your front door in time to be read with afternoon tea. And Edith comes to believe that Rose, an earthy lass who swears in public and loves inventive invectives, is behind the letters.
Screenwriter Jonny Sweet's debut script is based on events that really happened. While Letters may be fashioned at the beginning as a mystery about how one could be sending such awful letters, 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 to prove their guilt.
And this might be where Letters is most wonderfully intriguing. Director Thea Sharrock maximizes some deliciously provocative casting choices. Tamil actor Anjana Vasan is a hoot as "Woman Police Officer" Gladys Moss, who takes it upon herself to investigate the ongoing shenanigans despite being taken far less seriously than her white male colleague. The real Moss was not a brown-skinned woman, just as Rose's husband was not Black. But the colorblind casting 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 later. The craftiest thing Wicked Little Letters does is prodding us to interrogate our 21st century prejudices by underscoring the still-enduring social and cultural vectors along which ordinary everyday oppression continues to occur. ♦
Wicked Little Letters
