Wicked Little Letters

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on April 4, 2024.

(MA15+) ★★★★

Director: Thea Sharrock.

Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Timothy Spall, Joanna Scanlan, Gemma Jones, Malachi Kirby, Lolly Adefope, Eileen Atkins, Hugh Skinner, Paul Chahidi, Alisha Weir.

The things people do these days with their hair is shocking.

Swearing is great. It's fun. It's probably good for you. It's also frequently hilarious.

What's great about the swearing in Wicked Little Letters, aside from its inventiveness and humourousness, is that it's a metaphor for the repression and oppression of women. In post-WWI Britain, where women can't vote and are frowned upon for pretty much everything, letting loose with a few vulgarities can say so much, as it does in this charmingly potty-mouthed dramedy.

Colman is Edith Swan, the eager-to-please church mouse who cares for her ageing parents in between receiving vulgar letters that are offensive to her Christian sensibilities. Her enraged father (Spall) summons the constabulary, and all fingers point to the letter-writer being their neighbour Rose (Buckley), the unwed Irish mother next door. 

Based on a remarkable but little-known true story, the film is a colourful snapshot of British life in the 1920s, complete with its misogyny and repression. Much is made of Littlehampton's "woman police officer" (Vasan), who was a real person of the time and a convenient part of the film's core message around female oppression.

It will come as no surprise that Colman is fantastic as Edith Swan, the "good girl" of the piece, but also brilliant is the effervescent Buckley as the "bad girl". Both deliver their performances with believability, wit and empathy, with Buckley threatening to steal the show in the flashier role.

A great array of side-characters fill out proceedings, led by Spall's sneering father and Vasan as the plucky officer struggling to stay afloat in a pool of shallow men. There's not a performance out of place, except for Skinner's, whose lines as a dim-witted cop land awkwardly.

The only downside of Wicked Little Letters is its contrived ending. It pulls together its plot strands, particularly the relationship between Buckley's Rose and her daughter (played by Weir), into a slightly mawkish and far-too-convenient scene, and does the same with its climactic capture of the culprit by moving all the key characters into a single location. History can be a tricky thing to turn into a working narrative, and the efforts to do so here feel overly simplistic.  

But it's not enough to write off Wicked Little Letters. For the most part, this is a ferociously funny comedy that uses its foul mouth to tell a spicy tale of subjugation.