Wicked Little Letters (2023)
In a 1920s English hamlet, nasty letter-writing becomes a high crime
Edith (Olivia Colman) and Rose (Jessie Buckley) are neighbors at smiling war with one another
Wicked Little Letters (2023)
In theaters
Within the many varieties of mystery fiction, the most surprisingly unnerving sub-genre is the “cosy”. In these tidy meditations on evil, first generated by British novelists in the 1920s and ’30s, the uncovering of horrendous crimes is confined to a small village.
The crime and punishment are neatly resolved by the end. Hence the name. Homicide in such a peaceful rustic setting astounds as murder most foul. Thus, it’s immoderately pleasing when a tightly knit community unmasks a killer in its midst.
Now re-jigger the formula. Imagine weapons that aren’t toxins, daggers or firearms but poison-pen letters and you get this charming comic fable set in a 1920s English village. It’s based on true events, and rather than blood we’re kept in suspense by the spattering of nasty words.
The neatly contrived script evokes the notion of the cosy, and also satirizes it. Could anyone have taken vitriolic letter-writing this seriously? In real life, England’s press and politicians did.
The first recipient we meet is Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), a deeply pious spinster living at home with her tyrannical, mordantly religious father (Timothy Spall) and timid mother (Gemma Jones).
All three are horrified as anonymous letters addressed to Edith and filled with profane, shudderingly vulgar language keep coming through the mail slot.
It turns out others in the town are also receiving these poisonous missives filled with vile accusations of perversions. Most disturbingly, they contain enough local details to clearly mark the sender as a member of the community.
Who could engage in – with obvious relish – such swinish behavior? It doesn’t take long for Edith, her father and the town’s busybodies to settle on the village’s most foul-mouthed misfit.
That’s Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), an unmarried mother with a sweet daughter Nancy (Alicia Weir), a devoted boyfriend Bill (Malachi Kirby), and a sailor’s tongue.
Merry, iconoclastic drunk though Rose is, she doesn’t seem spiteful. She spits on conventions and mercilessly mocks Edith’s icy religiosity. But she doesn’t shirk responsibility for the mess she’s made of her life.
Colman is precise and comically maddening as the prim Edith. She’s nicely countered by Buckley’s bawdy Rose, whose coarseness conceals a warm inner life.
She can’t quiet the rebel in herself, so she tries to tame the distinctiveness in Nancy, whose love for the guitar Rose wants to quell. She tells her daughter the guitar is too common an instrument, not capable of beauty. We’ll learn that that’s precisely where Rose is wrong about the instrument and the goodness that’s still alive in herself.
Meanwhile, though, Rose’s handwriting looks close enough to a number of the letters, so she’s arrested. But Rose has all the guts she needs to blurt out any vitriol she’s feeling right to anyone’s face. She wouldn’t need letters to do it.
Rose (Jessie Buckley) under arrest; is she guilty of harassment by foul mail?
Which is why she finds an unlikely ally in upright, sharp-eyed policewoman Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan).
Mocked and underestimated by her male colleagues, Gladys sets out to prove Rose’s innocence. And to wipe the sanctified smile off the face of Edith, who’s smugly gleeful to see Rose punished for any indecency that will stick.
Beneath the cattiness, the underlying theme director Thea Sherrock and screenwriter Jonny Sweet rely on to keep this frothy parable in motion is female empowerment.
During this story’s time period, women in Britain still hadn’t fully won the right to vote (that wouldn’t happen until 1928). Male hegemony and religious piety harnessed too many women to servile, marginal roles.
Steam had to be let off. And writing grossly obscene letters – read aloud with gusto by the actors here – spat repressed emotions right in the public’s face.
Set off by Ben Davis’ nostalgically burnished cinematography and Cristina Casali’s handsome production design, the atmosphere feels both precious – it’s indeed a cosy little town – and maliciously fixated on gossip.
It’s apparent that no one’s secrets in this bucolic hotbox will remain unexposed for long.
Sherrock also directed the warm, upbeat soccer dramedy The Beautiful Game (2023) (my review). Here she again shows a deft hand with actors. Colman is precise and comically maddening as the prim Edith. She’s nicely countered by Buckley’s bawdy Rose, whose coarseness conceals a warm inner life.
Vasan is a poker-faced delight as Gladys, the sharp policewoman held back by condescending males on the force. She’ll show them! Rigorously investigating the mail scandal, she proves to be yet another woman whose true feelings can’t be bottled up any longer.
That’s how this unassuming little comedy rises to social relevance, though it’s blissfully riddled with giggles. In the 1920s, whether cultures, British or worldwide, realized it or not, female subjection was slowly being overturned. Society’s balance of power was beginning to tip toward women. The handwriting was on the wall.