Review: Wicked Little Letters

Director:  Thea Sharrock

Stars:  Anjana Vasan, Jessie Buckley, Olivia Colman

Sometimes a movie is the victim of its own marketing. In the case of Wicked Little Letters, its release comes as a major relief, if only because it means its overplayed trailer will finally leave circulation at multiplexes, independents and art house cinemas. The past four months have seen is shunted before anything and everything. This viewer (who admittedly visits the cinema with a higher frequency than your average Joe) got to their seat with “Yes Sir I Can Boogie” on a loop in their mind-tank, having unwittingly committed to memory every beat and cut of that trailer – both the censored and uncensored versions. Why have a censored version? Because Wicked Little Letters proffers us a gleefully sweary missive from the footnotes of 20th century British history.

Swearing is an artform unto itself. Anyone who’s encountered the three seasons of David Milch’s HBO western series Deadwood can attest to that. Milch turned swearing into Shakespeare. Used it to adjust cadence, to punctuate, to imbue character. Deadwood might just be the very best argument for swearing that TV or film has given us. At the other end of the spectrum are dunderheaded efforts that turn the act into a tiresome gratuity. I’m not prissy about it, but there’s a knack to it, and getting it right can involve ineffable alchemy.

Wicked Little Letters takes an awfully good crack at using foul language and oddball British humour to spice up its rather tepid telling of a poisoned pen wreaking havoc on the neighbourhoods of Littlehampton circa 1920.

Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) is a devout and prideful spinster living with her parents on Western Road next door to triumphantly brash and foul-mouthed Irish lass Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a relatively recent arrival on English shores who has a young daughter to look after. At the very beginning of Wicked Little Letters we’re already knee-deep in an ongoing controversy as Edith takes delivery of the up-teenth postal tirade sent to her by an anonymous hand. Edith’s domineering father Edward (Timothy Spall) has little doubt that Rose is behind the fruity hate mail, and rushes to get the local constabulary involved.

The force’s semi-sleeping policemen are inclined to agree that Rose is the most likely suspected – in spite of a complete lack of physical evidence – but newly-minted Woman Constable Gladys Moss (the ever-wonderful Anjana Vasan) is less easily swayed. Chided by her fellow officers, she is left to pursue her investigation off hours as Rose is swiftly arrested for the spate of libel letters.

It might carry the barbs of post-watershed language, but in all other respects Wicked Little Letters is a typically sedate, mildly risqué teatime telly affair. A little less slapstick than a rerun of Last of the Summer Wine and – as a whodunnit – considerably more simplistic than a Midsomer Murders. It doesn’t help that the aforementioned trailer gives you all the clues you need to clock the culprit long before the movie tips it… which it does surprisingly early. It’s big reveal squandered at around the mid-way point, what follows is a somewhat spurious trial and a lightweight but fun sting operation to put the case to bed once and for all.

Set against a backdrop of women’s suffrage, one can’t help but feel as though the more insightful action is happening out of frame, especially as the film’s acknowledgements of a throttling patriarchal hold on British life are fitful, and often subdued so as to keep the thing light and ticking along. On those scores director Thea Sharrock handles things well. Wicked Little Letters is pacey and breezy. In Colman, Buckley and Vasan she has the talents of three incredibly adept women to harness. All three share roughly equal footing in the trifecta narrative… the downside is that no one of them is given licence to fully take the picture by the reins. We get to know broad strokes about all three, but more complex shading seems to have been sacrificed in favour of rocketing swiftly through this ripping yarn.

In the moment its plenty watchable. Fine and fun (though the kookiness of the swearing loses its charm fairly fast). But it feels frustratingly cursory in the aftermath. A missed opportunity, one senses, to fully grapple with a curious true life incident that may have had a genuine impact on the history of criminal justice in the UK, and a potent promise of psychological enquiry that is only ever inferred. The motivations behind the crimes are the juiciest element, but they’re merely shrugged at come the curtail call.

Wicked Little Letters mainly gets points for not being as gratingly mawkish as most colloquial British comedies set in the same era. But praising a film for failing to trip into such recurrent gaping potholes isn’t exactly a rousing endorsement either. If swearing truly is an art, Wicked Little Letters can feel like a hastily hidden caricature dashed off while teacher wasn’t looking.