Wicked Little Letters review – a flimsy comic farce

This coffee table comedy from director Thea Sharrock and writer Jonny Sweet attempts to blow its viewers’ minds with the revelation that it’s not just men who have potty mouths. We’re down in the sleepy seaside burg of Littlehampton on the Southern-English coast during the early inter-war period. The mousy yet pompously-pious Edith (Olivia Colman) receives a poison-pen letter in the mail, much to the ire of her pearl-clutching parents (Timothy Spall and Gemma Jones). And it’s not the first.

The note contains reams of sexually-suggestive invective, all delivered in a strangely eccentric style. But who could be sending these malodorous missives and causing the perennially-single Edith all kinds of emotional strain, and whose life has, we discover, been a beset by an endless series of upsets and misfortunes? It’s most likely the shit-kicking, hooch-downing Irish good-time gal who lives next door, Jesse Buckley’s Rose Goodling. Whatever the truth, she’d be very easy to pin this crime on until the real culprit turns up.

Wicked Little Letters is the cinematic equivalent of the cosy mystery in literature: it cleaves to a tried-and-tested whodunit structure; divides the characters up into obvious goodies and baddies; and plays things out with the minimum of surprise and innovation. To cap things off, Anjana Vasan’s Lady Police Officer Gladys Moss takes on the case, even though the men at her constabulary see it as being above her pay grade. Swearing aside, it’s all extremely nice.

What’s sad about the film is that the feather-light comic tone seems to preclude any deeper insight into what are, on paper, a set of potentially fascinating and psychologically deep characters. Each one is given their simple demon to slay, and the film goes no further in trying to open things up further and pick up on some delicious ambiguities that are ripe for the picking. Edith in particular is woefully underdeveloped.

And we know that humour is a purely objective thing, but for this viewer there is a serious dearth of deep, resonant laughs. The naughty-naughty rude-rude puerile humour gets tired very quickly, and seasoned comic talents such as Colman and Vasan just aren’t given the material to work with. The film’s third act attempts to place this piece of intriguing historical flotsam into the wider context of British society’s inherently misogynistic strictures, but it’s too little too late.

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