Wicked Little Letters
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
Stars: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Timothy Spall, Gemma Jones
Writer: Jonny Sweet
Director: Thea Sharrock
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
You might expect to hear a bit of rough language in the new comedy Wicked Little Letters, seeing as it’s based on the true story of how the residents of a sedate 19th century British coastal town were scandalized by a series of profane anonymous notes that arrived in their mailboxes.
On the other hand, you might not expect to hear the film’s distinguished cast — including Olivia Colman, Timothy Spall, Jessie Buckley and Gemma Jones — spouting enough scatological, obscene, vulgar and generally nasty turns of phrase to make Joe Pesci blush.
That, as it happens, is how Wicked Little Letters earns most of its laughs: Witnessing this parade of tight-laced Victorians reciting, with mounting horror and abject disgust, a pile of trash talk that would get a present-day NFL player suspended is not without its naughty delights. In the end, though, the film has little more to offer than potty-mouth rants delivered with a stiff upper lip — barely enough to keep us interested for an hour and forty minutes.
Colman, who won an Oscar as a randy Queen Anne in 2019’s The Favourite, plays Edith Swann, a miserably uptight woman who lives with her haughty yet decidedly downmarket parents (Spall and Jones). Every day for weeks, the household has been scandalized by the arrival yet another crude, handwritten rant aimed at Edith (for some reason, the family’s disgust does not prevent them from reading each scandalous note out loud with remarkable dramatic flourish).
Suspicion is almost immediately cast upon Edith’s next-door neighbor, Rose (Buckley) — a young, free-spirited single mother who swears like a sailor and is the bawdiest patron of a local bar. Manipulating the local authorities, Edith manages to get Rose arrested and thrown into jail pending trial.
Luckily for Rose, some sympathetic friends manage to post her exorbitant bail; unluckily, the moment she’s sprung the letters return with a vengeance, now aimed at people throughout the community. No one believes Rose’s claim of innocence, except for police officer Gladys Moss (sweetly played by Anjana Vasan), among the nation’s first female constables, who defies her sexist superiors to track down the true culprit.
With her warmhearted 2016 romantic drama Me Before You, director Thea Sharrock proved herself a deft filmmaker with a refreshing reluctance to guide her narratives along the route of least resistance. This time, she seems happy to let first-time feature screenwriter Jonny Sweet take the reins, settling for reliable, cheap laughs when the story could have headed in more interesting directions. As it is, the plot plunges ahead as if it were a legitimate foul-mouthed mystery, when the identity of the poison pen author is virtually written in bold face nearly from the start.
Still, never underestimate the power of solid comic performances, and that is something Wicked Little Letters offers right through the fadeout. Colman, dewy-eyed and perpetually flustered, manages to evoke sympathy for Edith even at her most vengeful. As Rose, Buckley is a take-no-prisoners force of nature, crass and contemptuous, yet capable of tenderness and unexpected forgiveness.
Maybe best of all is Vasan as the female officer, a character based on a true, pioneering policewoman who today has a plaque in her honor. Stoic in the face of sexism, keenly aware that her behavior may impact generations of policewomen to come, Vasan’s Gladys barely registers her disdain for her superiors while surreptitiously pursuing her case. At times, as madness whirls around her, poker-faced Gladys seems like a character parachuted in from a Wes Anderson movie, and the contrast works very nicely.
A woman of few words, Gladys gently reminds us that, sometimes, the fewer choice words you offer, the better.
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