Tepid Comedy Wicked Little Letters Douses Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley’s Chemistry

We arrive at an unspecified point during the 1920s, in the English seaside town of Littlehampton. Prim and proper Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) has just received her 19th poison pen letter, packed full of foul-mouthed vitriol. Though she, or no-one else can prove it, the town’s suspicion rests on the shoulders of her next-door neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a bawdy Irish single mother who’s had her fair share of disagreements with Edith.

The town soon finds the “evidence” they need to arrest Rose, but the newly minted “Woman Police Officer” Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) is unconvinced of her guilt; after all, when Rose has had no qualms about confronting Edith to her face, why would she bother with anonymous letters? So along with a group of quirky townswomen, Moss sets about proving her innocence.

Wicked Little Letters opens with a title card proclaiming, “This is more true than you’d think…” and indeed many of the details—from the two women’s communal garden to the invisible ink ultimately used in catching the perpetrator—are mined from real life. Whereas the true story was more of a tragedy than a comedy, involving severe mental illness and horrendous miscarriages of justice, Thea Sharrock’s film adaptation is an unabashed crowd-pleaser, not willing to sit with the very real sadness undergirding the situation for any great length of time when that would get in the way of Colman saying “Fuck” again. 

The movie as a whole is way too reliant on the obscene letters in question, which aren’t all that amusing to begin with and become ever less so as the action progresses. There can be poetry in profanity, but there isn’t here—and while the unnatural ineptitude of the streams of swearing ultimately has a narrative purpose, it’s a long time before we arrive there. 

More funny is Edith’s unexpected happiness at being the recipient of such hate mail. Although she professes despair, she piously revels in her victimhood, declaring, “We worship a messiah who suffered, and so by suffering, do I not move closer to heaven?” It’s clear that she loves being the center of attention in a world that has long pushed her aside, even when that attention is so very unflattering (a newspaper article: “The childless spinster is grim-looking, and by no means conventionally charming”). 

She’s soon simply unable to hide her pleasure, to the extent that an acquaintance (Lolly Adefope) tells her awkwardly but unironically, “Congratulations… on your tragedy?!” Colman’s portrayal of this pious woman having the time of her life in the most unlikely circumstances is delightful but textured, especially as the pain beneath her joy becomes more apparent.

As her opposite number, Buckley is full of swagger and radiance, blasting through each scene with charismatic bombast. She’s so gleefully forceful, she gives the impression of being able to destroy the patriarchy singlehandedly, if everyone else would just get the hell out of her way. In the sequence that explains how the two initially fell out, we see that Edith at first found Rose thrilling, and Buckley makes that easy to understand. She and Colman played the same character at different ages in 2021’s The Lost Daughter, and while that was a far superior movie, it’s undeniably fun to watch the off-screen friends interact here; their comic chemistry begs further outings. 

Unfortunately, beyond the two of them, there’s very little to elevate Wicked Little Letters beyond the standard BBC Sunday teatime (maybe Sunday night, considering all the swearing…) fare. Vasan is endearing as a perpetually underrated detective (the real-life first female police officer in the U.K.) and Timothy Spall is chilling as Edith’s controlling father, but Jonny Sweet’s screenplay doesn’t ask anything of them beyond, respectively, pluckiness and malice, which is a real waste of talent. Speaking of which, the stacked supporting cast—Joanna Scanlon, Gemma Jones, Adefope, Eileen Atkins—are given even less to do. And behind the camera, Sharrock’s direction is flat and televisual, with little eye for interesting composition or spatial cogency.

The movie’s messages about not treating women as second-class citizens and the power of female solidarity are all delivered with convincing sincerity, yet they are also as dated as the 1920s setting—it feels like Wicked Little Letters is fighting a battle that was won decades ago. The film makes a point of how senseless it is that Gladys is constantly referred to as Woman Police Officer Moss, and while it is ridiculous that female officers had that “W” qualifier in their title until 1999, that practice still hasn’t existed since the turn of the millennium. Of course, the world is full of misogynists, and there are undoubtedly many who don’t mind men swearing but are aghast at women doing the same, or who still insist on referring to female physicians as “Lady Doctors,” but the general public discourse has moved far on. 

As well-meaning and sporadically funny as it may be, Wicked Little Letters is too dated and tepid to be anything except forgettable. Perhaps the best it can hope for is that someone sees the vibrant chemistry shared by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, uses it as the centerpiece for another, better movie, and Wicked Little Letters becomes a part of its origin story. 

Director: Thea Sharrock
Writer: Jonny Sweet
Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Joanna Scanlan, Gemma Jones, Malachi Kirby, Lolly Adefope, Eileen Atkins, Timothy Spall
Release Date: March 29, 2024

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.