WICKED LITTLE LETTERS - Mark Reviews Movies

Wicked Little Letters, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2024

If there's anything worse than moral hypocrites, it's moral hypocrites in a small town, where everybody knows and gets into everyone else's business with tawdry enthusiasm. That's both the plot and the thematic core of Wicked Little Letters, which is based on a true and apparently forgotten story that became quite the scandal in England following the Great War. It seems downright quaint in the modern age of internet trolls and anonymity making insults the common parlance, but if the mentality behind the eponymous letters and such online behavior is similar or the same, who knows what the current-day equivalents are hiding.

The premise is the stuff of comedy at first. Prim and proper Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) has received more than a dozen letters from an anonymous sender. These are no ordinary missives, though. They are filled with profanity, vulgar descriptions of unnatural acts, and pointedly cruel descriptions of how she looks, speaks, and behaves.

Her father Edward (Timothy Spall) is outraged, and her mother Victoria (Gemma Jones) looks as if she will faint upon hearing such language, especially aimed at her daughter. Edith, though, is a religious woman, taking the written abuse with patience, a sense of righteousness, and an attitude of forgiveness toward whoever might be sending these letters.

Colman's great here in making Edith come across as superficially sincere, which makes her instantly unlikeable in a way we can't quite place on a rational level but feel deep to the core. Who makes such a show of being a victim under such circumstances, while also claiming not wanting to be seen as a martyr?

Well, Edith does, and the hypocrisy basically pours out of her every protest, each claim of having compassion for the sender, and any slight when she's not receiving enough attention for what she has to endure. It's a good show for those who can't see through it, but the woman she accuses of this letter-writing campaign most certainly can note how transparent Edith is.

That would be her neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a recent arrival from Ireland, who has come to the sleepy town of Littlehampton to start a new life with her daughter Nancy (Alisha Weir) and live-in beau Bill (Malachi Kirby). A war widow, Rose outdrinks men at the local pub, walks around barefoot, and doesn't hold her tongue.

Yes, a good number of the more off-color words that appear in the letters come right out of Rose's mouth, but despite everyone suspecting she's the one behind the nasty epistles, Rose's defensive logic is airtight. Why would she write such things in secret when she makes a habit of saying exactly what she thinks about others right to their faces? Buckley, one of the best actors of her generation, inhabits this role with high energy, a real command over Rose's four-letter vocabulary and willingness to speak her mind without a filter, and a level of actual sincerity that means a lot more than the display Edith puts on for everyone.

After officially accusing her next-door neighbor to the police, Edith explains how the two of them were close and friends after Rose's arrival. As a good friend, Rose would stand up for Edith against her domineering father, and the only possible motive Edith can offer is that Rose is jealous of her life. The cops accept it all, arrest Rose, and put her in prison until her upcoming trial on the charge of libel.

Some of this, then, is a mystery. Since Rose likely isn't the culprit, who is actually writing the letters? It's not much of a surprise, obviously, but the mystery isn't the real point of Jonny Sweet's screenplay.

That's to use this real-life incident as a way to tear off the polite pleasantries of this little town, to place these two women in stark contrast to each other beyond what everyone sees on the surface, and to dig into the inherent hypocrisy of such an insulated and judgmental slice of society. Edith is both the key representative of that way of thinking, holding court with her friends and acquaintances about how wronged she is and with what supposed compassion she reacts to it, and an actual victim of it.

For that second part, one need look no further than her father, who treats his adult daughter like a child to be commanded and scolded. When the truth of the letters is revealed, it would be reasonable to entirely dismiss the writer, if not how inherently tragic the motive turns out to be.

Director Thea Sharrock makes room for sympathy about that part of the story, while also giving us a compelling bit of do-it-yourself investigation and a clever way of incorporating the politics of the time into the mystery. This is, after all, a time before women here have the right to vote and after they were expected to do the work of all the men sent to fight the war. The local woman police officer, named Gladys (Anjana Vasan), has to introduce herself with the full title "Woman Police Officer," and some other women in town rally around Rose, because she's willing to say exactly what they've been thinking for a while. Yes, the swearing is deserved the majority of the time when it's aimed at busybodies, charlatans, and chauvinists like the ones here.

Wicked Little Letters, then, is a funny, skillfully performed, and well-crafted tale about fake moral outrage and where the real indignation should be aimed. If not for the fact that it comes from a true story, this would be a fine parable, but the film is grounded in enough discomforting realities to make it more than a broad allegory or a fact-based oddity.

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